The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley by Ruth Herman

Abstract

168 ventionally satirized, on occasion we glimpse a more independent female strength. For example, the discarded mistress Belira, whose plot to regain her lost lover fails, is at least allowed to express her hurt and resentment: ‘‘But thy heart, Traytor, thy perjur’d Heart; tell me, how shall I get it back?’’ The pieces written within a theatrical context are supplemented by the Letters Writen by Mrs Manley, an epistolary account of a stage coach journey to the country. With its loosely strung episodes and keenly observed fellow travellers, the letters anticipate the great picaresque novels of the next century, but they also bear witness to the distance writers like Smollett and Fielding would have to travel in terms of characterization and plot. Manley is a transitional figure, bridging the gap between two very distinct literary epochs. This volume offers an interesting overview of one of the mothers of the English novel. Ms. Hodgson-Wright’s concise Introduction gives some indispensable information about the author and the selected texts. The carefully reproduced facsimiles convey a sense of the materiality of late seventeenth-century printed texts. The only thing to be desired are explicatory notes that would assist the understanding of the nonspecialist readers addressed in the general editors’ Preface. Virginia Richter University of Berne RUTH HERMAN. The Business of a Woman : The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley. Newark: Delaware, 2003. Pp. 332. $59.50. Instead of a study devoted to gender politics, Ms. Herman’s book is, more happily, devoted to the career of a successful political writer who was also a woman. Certainly, Manley’s gender played a role in her professional life. In fact, her gender was surely the reason Manley emerged on the literary scene as a writer of ‘‘scandal fiction rather than straight political propaganda until she had made her name.’’ Salacious narratives focused on the sexual peccadilloes of the powerful were accepted from women who, by the very act of writing, tacitly renounced much of their own claim to virtue. Political propaganda, however, was a new domain for all writers . It was an enterprise presided over by men—or, actually, by one man, Robert Harley, whom Ms. Herman describes accurately as ‘‘perhaps the first political leader in England to realize the power of the printed word and the importance of influencing and controlling public opinion through a regular and wellorganized political press.’’ Manley astutely saw the need to come to Harley’s attention and just as astutely traveled the roads available to her as a writer to do so. She wrote her way into his world. This effective study may lose readers by the predictability of the argument in the first four chapters. Ms. Herman begins by reviewing the facts (as we know them) of Manley’s life—notorious and sensational. While the scandals are expectedly rehearsed, Ms. Herman directs our attention to a fact of Manley’s early life that has been underemphasized in many (though by no means all) previous studies: from her beginnings in a ‘‘long established gentry family’’ with ‘‘Royalist loyalties,’’ Manley was always ‘‘a fully functioning member of a highly politicized section of society.’’ The ‘‘section’’ was, of course, the Tory party. Manley’s scandal fictions, which Ms. Herman discusses in chapters two, three, and four, were highly successful attacks on Whig political character, es- 169 pecially the Marlboroughs’. They were also Manley’s ticket to a position on ‘‘the Tory writing team.’’ What had been Manley’s aspiration all along is sealed, for all practical purposes, by her appointment to the editorship of the Examiner . As a member of the team, she wrote ‘‘several little pamphlets and papers ’’ that helped maintain Tory party minister Harley’s ascendancy over his most important rival, Bolingbroke. Ms. Herman’s research into the complexities of the Harley/Bolingbroke battle for Tory leadership is exhaustive and compelling. Situating Manley in a complex political setting, she demonstrates convincingly that Manley was a major player. In fact, the single most important corrective of Ms. Herman’s study illuminates the relationship between Swift and Manley. Ms. Herman makes it clear that Swift was a genuine friend to Manley . His remarks regarding her indebtedness to him were not...