Davys, Mary | Jean B. Kern (essay date 1983)
Jean B. Kern (essay date 1983)
SOURCE: "Mrs. Mary Davys as a Novelist of Manners" in Essays in Literature, Vol. X, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 29-38.
[In the following essay, Kern analyzes Davys as a novelist of manners in and against the tradition of women's romance writing.]
Mrs. Mary Davys (1674-1732), playwright, novelist, and occasional poet, has not fared well from biographers, literary historians, or critics. The DNB is inaccurate about her dates; she is not mentioned in the Oxford Companion to English Literature although her contemporaries Mary Manley and Elizabeth Haywood are; Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel does not even include her name, but his omission is more understandable than the inaccuracies of Ernest A. Baker's ten-volume History of the English Novel, which is wrong both about her life, calling her the widow of a schoolmaster of York, and about her novels, which he seems not to have read with care....
[The entire page is 5784 words long]
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