A Possible Early Publication by Mary Davys and its Swiftian Afterglow

Abstract

RELATIVELY little is known about the early decades of Mary Davys, both in terms of her biography and her literary activities. The most substantial discussions of both aspects are found in an encyclopaedia entry on Davys by Paula Backscheider, who underlines Davys’s importance for the history of the novel but also points to the ‘difficulties’ the author had in ‘establishing herself as a writer in London’;1 and in the substantial introduction by Martha Bowden to her modern edition of some works by Davys. With respect to the author’s early adulthood, Bowden points out that Davys’s family background remains mysterious and that not even the date of her marriage to Peter Davys, Master of the Free School of St Patrick and friend of Jonathan Swift, can be ascertained, as the Dublin archive housing the necessary documentation was destroyed by fire. In fact, Bowden begins her introduction by stating that Davys’s ‘parentage, family name, and origins are all lost’.2 The date of their marriage must fall, by conjecture, between 1692 and 1694.3 Beyond that, it is only the death of her husband Peter in 1698 and her departure from Ireland to England around 1700 that are known. Commenting retrospectively, in the introduction to her collected works, on her early attempts at literary writing, Davys herself claims in 1725 to have written The Lady’s Tale in 1700 and that it constituted ‘my first Flight to the Muses’.4