Delarivier Manley: Satire as Conversation

Delarivier Manley both ventriloquizes and parodies male classical satirical traditions as she satirically rewrites Whig narratives of the Glorious Revolution. Manley frames her retort to the male wits of her day not merely as literal conversations in her political secret histories but through a revision to the traditional genres she was working in, thus effecting the conversation at the meta-level of genre. From her early epistolary work, Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley (1696), through her best-selling New Atalantis (1709) and her Adventures of Rivella (1714), Manley demonstrates her vision of satire as a mode simultaneously in parodic conversation with classical satire, political secret history, official history, travelogue, romance, pamphlet, periodical, and memoir. Across her career, Manley created satires that were not merely "parasitic" on prior genres but were the grounds for intergeneric conversation and the invention of new hybrid genres. She well understood that the most effective retort to the Whig satirists of her era would be to redefine the genres in which the satirical history of their own time would be written.