Delarivier Manley

Delarivier (sometimes spelt Delariviere, Delarivière or de la Rivière) Manley (1663 or c. 1670 – 24 July 1724) was an English author, playwright, and political pamphleteer. (Some outdated sources list her first name as Mary, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that this was in error; that was the name of one of her sisters, and she always referred to herself as Delarivier or Delia.)

Manley is sometimes referred to (with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood) as one of "The fair triumvirate of wit"—a later attribution.

Biography

Much of our knowledge about Delarivier Manley is rooted in her insertion of "Delia's story" in the New Atalantis (1709), and the Adventures of Rivella she published as the biography of the author of the Atalantis with Edmund Curll in 1714. Curll added further details on the publication history behind the Rivella in the first posthumous edition of the quasi-fictional and not entirely reliable autobiography in 1725.

Manley was probably born in Jersey, the third of six children of Sir Roger Manley, a royalist army officer and historian, and a woman from the Spanish Netherlands, who died when Delarivier was young. It seems that she and her sister Cornelia moved with their father to his various army postings.