Davys, Mary | Margaret Anne Doody (essay date 1974)
Margaret Anne Doody (essay date 1974)
SOURCE: A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 17-22, 132-35.
[In the following excerpt from a study of Samuel Richardson, Doody discusses Davys and other women novelists of his day.]
After writers like Mrs. Aphra Behn and Mrs. Manley had shown that it was possible for women to write and be read, even to earn money by the exercise of the pen, a host of minor writers had taken up the love novel or novella. The teens and twenties of the century show a proliferation of such works by authors with whose names the veriest dunce of a sorcerer's apprentice would not attempt to conjure: Mrs. Penelope Aubin, Mrs. Jane Barker, Mrs. Mary Davys. Eliza Haywood is the only feminine novelist of the period to achieve any slight degree of lasting fame, and that, the result of Pope's reference in The Dunciad, is largely ill repute. Their works have very...
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