“Every Rascally Scribbler”: Mary Davys’s Novel Innovations in a Newly Identified Pseudonymous Text, Love and Friendship (1718)

Abstract

ABSTRACT In important accounts of Mary Davys’s short epistolary work Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady (1725), Riley (1995) and Wakely (2005) suggest Davys subverts the amatory mode through its Whig, and feminist, inversion of the Tory seduction narrative. This paper’s identification of an early edition of the text, printed for J. Roberts, and attributed to the pseudonym “Dick Fisher” in 1718 complicates these accounts while providing a new vantage point from which to read the text. Importantly, new prefatory and paratextual material associated with the publication demonstrate both Davys’s commercial acumen and the porous character of the book trade in the early eighteenth century. Using this publication as a case study, this paper examines authorial agency and the complex nature of book production in the early British book trade, arguing that understanding such multiplicities is necessary for the reading of early women writers and their work.