Mary Pix

Mary Pix (1666 – 17 May 1709) was an English novelist and playwright. Church records indicate that she lived in London, marrying George Pix, a merchant tailor from Hawkhurst, Kent in 1684. Baptismal records reveal that she had two sons, George (1689) and William (1691). It appears that George died in 1690.

Life and Works

Mary Griffith Pix was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; her father, Roger Griffith, died when she was very young, but Mary and her mother continued to live in the schoolhouse after his death. She was courted by her father's successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, just one year after the mysterious fire that burned the schoolhouse. Rumour had it that Mary and Dalby had been making love rather energetically and overturned a candle which set fire to the bedroom.

At the age of 18, Mary Griffith married George Pix, a merchant, in 1684 and moved to his country estate in Kent. In 1690, her first son, George, died very young. The next year the couple moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William. In 1696, when Pix was thirty years old, she first emerged as a professional writer, publishing The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betrayed, her first and only novel, as well as two plays, Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks and The Spanish Wives.