ABSTRACT
Shortly thereafter she became the companion of Barbara Palmer, the Duchess of Cleveland, who figures in several works. They soon quarreled, and Manley retired to Exeter, having discovered, as she put it in The Adventures ofRivella, that "her Love of Solitude was improved by her Disgust of the World." In Exeter she wrote the first of her works: two playsThe Lost Lover, a comedy, and The Royal Mischief, a tragedy-and an epistolary protonovel entitled Letters Written by Mrs. Manley (1696; retitled A Stage Coach Journey to Exeter in 1725). At about this time she had an affair with Sir Thomas Skipworth, who produced her plays in London in 1696. The Lost Lover presented at Drury Lane c. March 1696, had little success, but the tragedy, which appeared a month or so later at Lincoln's Inn Fields, helped to establish Manley's reputation and yielded her a financial profit. Both plays were preceded by important feminist prefaces. Only "prejudice against our Sex," she maintained, prevented the plays from receiving a more enthusiastic reception. Partly as a response to these statements, Drury Lane shortly thereafter exposed Manley and other women playwrights of the period to public ridicule by presenting a burlesque of the production of The Royal Mischief entitled The Female Wits. Whether
this play had a chastening effect on Manley is unclear, but she gave up writing (or at least publishing) for nearly a decade. During this period she became romantically involved with John Tilly, who was married and the warden of the Fleet Street prison. Tilly was the great love of her life, but she gave him up after several years to allow him to make a financially advantageous liaison with a rich widow.
