When Delarivier¹ Manley was arrested for seditious libel in 1709, according to her later account of the inquest, fiction was her alibi.² She had written Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709), the provocative allegorical satire on sexual and political corruption among the Whigs who then controlled the government of Queen Anne. Like an earlier work that was probably also by Manley, The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1704), The New Atalantis was particularly intent upon libeling Sarah Churchill, then Lady Marlborough, and the Whig ministers closest to her. Both books were huge successes; the first went through at least six editions in as many years. The New Atalantis was so popular that Sarah Churchill anxiously wrote to Queen Anne complaining that "notwithstanding the prosecution" it was being "sold at every shop."³

The prosecution was a partisan affair; the government probably hoped, in questioning Delarivier Manley about her motives, to uncover the active participation of prominent Tories in the composition of The New Atalantis.⁴ According to her version of the events, written in the third-person, the prosecutors pressed the author to confess her political-economic motivation and admit she had informants in high places. Instead, she pleaded innocent on the grounds that she was merely a fiction writer:

They used several arguments to make her discover who were the persons in her books, or at least from whom she had received information of some special facts which they thought were above her own intelligence.

Her defence was with much humility and sorrow for having offended, at the same time denying that any persons were concerned with her or that she had a farther design than writing for her own amusement and diversion in the country, without intending particular reflections on characters.

When this was not believed and the contrary urged very home to her by several circumstances and likenesses she said then it must be inspiration, because, knowing her own innocence, she could account for it no other way.

The secretary replied upon her that inspiration used to be upon a good account and her writings were stark naught. She told him, with an air full of patience, that might be true, but it was as true that there were evil angels as well as good, so, nevertheless, what she had wrote might still be by inspiration.⁵

Such a defense, if it were indeed made, was certainly not designed to convince anyone that Manley was an isolated genius or an ignorant but innocent woman merely trying to amuse herself. It was more likely a species of tactical play, calculated to confound and embarrass the prosecution as well as protect Manley's associates.⁶ She makes herself liable by claiming full responsibility for the offensive book, but the very terms of her admission simply signal her refusal to cooperate with the prosecution. Insisting on the pure fictionality of the text allowed Manley both to deny her sources and to place the burden of identifying the libeled persons of quality on her interrogators, who were thus tricked into attaching the scandalous stories to the names of Whig ministers, in a sense becoming parties to the libel. Her appeal to "inspiration" was similarly disingenuous, at once evoking and mocking the idea of the isolated literary genius. The alibi of fiction thus had many uses, but deceit was not one of them. It was as transparently untrue (or, since it was not intended to convince, as truly fictional) as the pure fictionality of The New Atalantis.

In Delarivier Manley's heroic version of her defense, then, we are given the truth of a political crime opposed by the fictionality of a fictional alibi. Indeed, the transparent fictionality of the alibi indicates the truth of the charge. Delarivier Manley's case is full of paradoxes of this sort, which I will trace to explore an extraordinary moment in the history of English women's writing, a moment when party politics, fiction, the literary marketplace, and feminine sexuality became intricately entangled. I will describe three "knots" of this entanglement: first, the crossing of fiction and politics in legal discourse; second, the conjunction and disjunction of feminine eroticism and politics; and a third crux produced by the dramatization in The New Atalantis of a thwarted attempt to undo the first two knots.

An adequate explanation of these entanglements, the sort of explanation I do not have space to develop here, would view them as parts of a process of realignment between politics and commerce in general, and politics and the literary marketplace in particular. Such an explanation might point, for example, to a new discursiveness in English politics, a redefinition of politics as public, indeed, published debate. It would also take into consideration the growth of what J. G. A. Pocock has called "civil humanism," an ideology that conferred a high value on personality traits cultivated both in commerce and in social intercourse between the sexes. It would no doubt also describe the effects of the reciprocal stimulation of the national debt and the growth of speculative finance capital. All of these rearticulations of the connections and boundaries between politics and commerce, one might argue, aggravated anxieties about the possible dependence of reality on language and men on women. Consequently, women writers, who had new opportunities for making themselves useful to both political parties, also found themselves loaded with the collective guilt generated by the new political-commercial-discursive interpenetrations.

"Scandalosissima Scoundrelia," as a contemporary publication dubbed Manley,⁷ seems to have carried this guilt by representing the scandal of scandal: the affront to propriety offered by the public discrediting of people in authority. Such a figure was especially necessary when almost all political writers were actually scandalmongering, when political discourse had barely entered the process of defining what would be a proper and what an improper accusation, when almost every partisan attack was ad hominem. Manley's career, therefore, was conditioned by her genre, which was not "fiction" as she facetiously (and many later critics⁸ quite seriously) claimed, but was rather scandalous allegorical narrative. In order to understand her exemplary significance we have to emphasize what recent critics have tended simply to note in passing: that her works were indeed defamatory "reflections" on her contemporaries. Only by moving this fact into the center of our analysis can we give either an adequate formal descripiton of her writings or trace their complicated crossing of politics, fiction, and femininity.

Fiction and Politics: Libelous Crossings

Let me continue to trace the paradox of Delarivier Manley's alibi, the alibi that continually crosses politics with fiction through the economic, political, and legal labyrinth of early eighteenth-century letters. It seems very odd to come up with an alibi that no one is supposed to believe, just as it seems odd to invent allegories and codes that are supposed to be transparent. The normal way of explaining this bizarre feature of Augustan literary life is simply to see it as designed for the use to which Manley put it at her inquest: protection against the libel law. After the Licensing Act lapsed in 1695, and before the new copyright law of 1709 and the Stamp Act of 1712 were passed, the English printing trade was almost entirely unregulated.⁹ Because the state found itself without automatic channels of pre-publication censorship, it relied all the more heavily on prosecutions for libel.¹⁰ Almost anything that "reflected" on the government, the crown, the church, the Parliament, the laws, persons of quality, private persons, etc., could be prosecuted." The libelous statements did not need to be false; indeed, they did not even need to be damaging. Merely "reflecting" on the forbidden topics was illegal. Precisely because the law was so broad, prosecutions tended to be highly factional. A Whiggish Secretary, for example, might prosecute High Church Tories for defending the Church against dissenting attacks because such defenses, the prosecutors claimed, might give the people the impression that the Church was in danger and thereby spread alarm. Even zealous patriotism could thus be read as seditious libel. When we add to all this the consideration that during the triumvirate period, the government, itself of no party, was inclined to indict writers of any party, it becomes clear that entering into any controversy on any side could make one vulnerable to prosecution.

Why, then, we might ask, didn't writers just avoid political controversy? This question also has a standard answer. It was all but impossible for a writer to stay out of politics during the period from 1695 (the discontinuance of the Licensing Act) to 1714 (the death of Queen Anne) because political controversy was virtually the only road to making either a name or a living as a writer.¹² The economics of authorship were especially precarious, for although lack of regulation probably swelled the population of Grub Street, it also made authors and printers powerless against pirating.¹³ It is extremely difficult to calculate the incomes of the majority of writers, but the conditions of the London printing trade from 1695-1714 suggest that it was probably a period of their unusually harsh exploitation. Predictably, instances of private patronage declined every decade after 1700, although subscription publishing continued throughout the early eighteenth century and was even "democratized" by London syndicates that advertised everywhere for subscribers.¹⁴ But in the period under discussion, patronage remained the dominant and necessary form of literary support, though it tended to flow through partisan political channels. Writers, no longer fully dependent on the Crown or individual aristocrats, found themselves indebted to emergent political institutions that were only beginning to organize and define themselves.

Thus there was an unprecedented politicization of authorship in this period and a new reliance of politics on writing. Writers were central to the process of party formation and to that other enormous change in British politics, the development of ministerial government. The political patrons, the heads of parties, needed writers who could articulate and in numerous instances invent the "principles" on which the patronage depended.¹⁵ The great lords who controlled the political purse-strings, although constantly accused of ingratitude by their writers, in fact did manage to subsidize the production of a large quantity of writing during this period, either by direct payment to writers or by the distribution of pensions, offices, and other places. The nature of both politics and writing, however, was altered in the transaction.

The new public textuality of political controversy was, of course, impossible to restrict to a readership actively involved in running the country. This period famously marks the beginning of a political culture in England, in which the London press, dominated and subsidized by party and ministerial politics, shaped that still-embryonic entity, the reading "public." The vast majority of writers only managed to make their way in the world by engaging in political controversy, that is, by making themselves liable to prosecution for libel. As James Bramston facetiously asked somewhat later in the century,

Can Statutes keep the British Press in awe
When that sells best, that's most against the law?"¹⁶

Party politics and ministerial government, the very forces that were bringing the libel prosecutions against controversial publications, were also feeding on, stimulating, and subsidizing the marketplace in those very publications.

Hence, like Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, and Susanna Centlivre, Delarivier Manley practiced partisan political writing because: 1) it was the most popular form in the incipient literary marketplace; 2) it held the additional financial advantage of sometimes commanding party patronage; and 3) party loyalty became in the late years of Anne's reign "the new criterion for activity and friendship" in literary London.¹⁷ Although she probably did not receive much for the manuscript of The New Atalantis, in 1711 we find her requesting patronage from Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and head of the Tory Party: "If your Lordship think I have been any way serviceable, however accidentally, your justice will inspire you to give me your protection; if no, I hope your generosity will incite you to reward my good endeavours, whether by some small pension … or some other effect of your bounty, which I humbly leave to your Lordship's choice."¹⁸ Swift also turned over the editorship of The Examiner, the Tory organ of abuse, to Manley in 1710, and one of his letters mentions the necessity of "doing something" for Mrs. Manley. She was commissioned to write other Tory pamphlets in the late years of the reign as well. Partisan works were not her only productions, but they were certainly a high percentage of her writings between 1704 and 1714. Delarivier Manley was a phenomenon of the new political culture that kept the Secretary of State so busy issuing warrants.

The relationship between these well-known conditions of authorship and the style of Augustan literature, as I noted earlier, is sometimes said to be quite uncomplicated. Allegories and other stylistic disguises such as ironic inversions and numbered codes, we are told, developed as technicalities through which the penalities of the law might be evaded.¹⁹ Certainly some techniques of the period fit this description, and writers were found of expatiating on both their necessity and their transparency. Swift, for example, would on occasion discuss the disguises of satire as if they were quite extraneous to its substance:

First, we are careful never to print a man's name out at length; but as I do that of Mr. St—le: So that although every body alive knows who I mean, the plaintiff can have no redress in any court of justice. Secondly, by putting cases [telling recognizable but fictionalized stories] … [Lastly,] by nicknames, either commonly known or stamped for the purpose, which every body can tell how to apply.²⁰

The literary techniques, in other words, were supposedly mere technicalities for avoiding arrest or hindering successful prosecution. They were legal exigencies imposed from without, not rhetorical strategies developing from within the satirical intent.

We should note that in this view, technique and message, literature and politics, are substantially disengaged; political satire took, for example, the form of allegorical narrative because one could always claim that the story was not meant to reflect on any real, living person or contemporary event. But when one thus sees the stylistic component of the satire simply as a hindrance to prosecution, the literary techniques take on the attributes of mere codes, devices wholly separable from the message, which one extracts by a process of decoding.

Literary historians have sometimes followed this line of reasoning until it yielded an explanation for the appearance of early fiction. The need for legal protection led to increasing diguises, which eventually took on an independent life of their own, leaving behind the context of political controversy (to which the techniques were generally irrelevant anyway) and resulting in the invention of the purely literary. Gulliver's Travels has been cited as an example of this development—a satirical allegory that, having thoroughly concealed its topical reflections, remained opaque as "personal" or specific satire and thereby achieved the status of a fictional classic.²¹ However, in the above passage by Swift, such a development is not anticipated, for the devices described are imagined to be completely transparent, so transparent that one can hardly call them disguises of political purpose at all. Rather, like Manley's alibi of inspiration, they indicate, although in a supposedly arbitrary way, illicit political intentions.

This latter fact, that the techniques indicated rather than concealed libelous statements, leads to a difficulty if one is arguing that the writers were only trying to protect themselves from prosecution by allegorizing, changing names, or altering circumstances. We should note at the outset that these devices did not always protect writers and printers from either arrest or successful prosecution. Of course, we cannot conclude that they were completely ineffective. They multiplied the issues in a libel case to the advantage of the accused, and they introduced legal questions that a jury, rather than the Court alone, could decide.²² However, one ran an obvious risk in using such artifices, for although they interfered with prosecutions, they also at times alerted prosecutors to the libelous nature of a piece of writing.

Let us look, for example, at the legal status of the "allegorical style" favored by Manley that consisted in telling scandalous stories, placed in distant historical, exotic, or mythical settings, but referring to recognizable real persons. The author of a 1738 book called State Law: or, The Doctrine of Libels Discussed and Examined explains why such fictional allegorizing was by no means a foolproof protection against prosecution: "[W]hat Right has the allegorical Style to escape [the law of libel]? … if it be the common Notion, that this Picture represents a certain Person, the Drawer is answerable for the Injury he suffers."²³ Hence the more "every body alive knows who is meant," to paraphrase Swift, the more ineffective the technique as alibi.

This technique, then, could not always be counted on as an effective defense. Quite the contrary, for in many cases such as Manley's it not only indicated but also constituted the crime itself. To explain this, let me continue with the discussion of allegory in State Law: or, The Doctrine of Libels:

If a man draws a picture of another, and paints him in any shameful Posture, or ignominious Manner, 'tho no Name be to it; yet if the Piece be such, that the Person abused is known by it, the Painter is guilty of a Libel; what then should serve in Excuse for the allegorical Libeller? Abusive Allegory in Writing, has a very near Resemblance to this satyrical Kind of Painting: The Man that is painted with Fool's Cap and Horns, is certainly abused; but, says the Painter, he is disguised [by the Fools Cap and Horns], and how can you pretend to know him. This is the very subterfuge of the Allegorist, and ought to have the same Answer.²⁴

The answer is that the disguise (fools cap and horns) is the libel. The allegories in Manley's works are often precisely of this abusive type. When she "disguises" Godolpohin as "Volpone" or Steele as "M. Ingrat", the fictional names themselves are the guilty "reflections." Swift's "St—le" may be a neutral code and a mere technicality, but "M. Ingrat" conveys the accusation in the very act of changing the name. When Manley portrays Sarah Churchill as the ravenous Queen Zarah, literally usurping the throne from the rightful monarch, such "fictionalizing" of circumstances was itself the criminal message about the Duchess of Marlborough and Queen Anne. To claim the allegorical "disguise" as the grounds of one's defense was thus tantamount to pointing to the most obnoxious aspect of the crime as evidence of one's innocence.²⁵ The legal status of Manley's style was hence profoundly ambivalent: the style could be viewed in Swift's terms as her alibi or, in the terms of State Law, as her crime. If one sees the allegory's function as disguise, it appears to be insurance against political prosecution; but if one sees its function as abuse, the disguise becomes the very thing that would provoke prosecution.

Although both contemporary views of allegory (alibi and crime) inside this legal discourse cross the technique with politics, we should notice that State Law's discussion actually focusses attention on allegory, takes it seriously, in a way that Swift's view does not. When satirical allegory is seen as the crime, the allegorical level, the textual level of technique where the writer invents many of the very circumstances that constitute the defamation, takes on an opacity that Swift's view would deny. It was acknowledged that such techniques marked the controversial text and thereby attracted potential readers. In Swift's description, though, one only looked for such devices in order to look through them, whereas those who recognized the abusive function of allegories such as Manley's perceived the device as the controversial matter and thus bestowed on it an interest of its own. Thus we might conclude that it was the "crime" view of allegory, the view that wholly identified it with political transgression, and not the "alibi" view, the view that tried to make it incidental, that gave greater and greater weight to techniques we now call "fictional" and encouraged their development.

Let us then momentarily hold in abeyance the idea that Manley's technique protected her from prosecution and concentrate instead on how "fictional" allegorical invention furthered her libelous purposes. What Manley gained from the allegorical necessity of altering and therefore inventing circumstances was a representational density that enabled especially effective libel. Manley's talent was for crafting the invented circumstances into what we would now call an intrinsically satisfying narrative, one that is read for its own sake as well as for its scandalous referentiality. At their best, the stories of The New Atalantis inspired a partial disregard for veracity that allowed them to develop simultaneously toward a more seemingly specific referentiality and a more independent "fictionality."

For example, in comparing two passages from Manley's works, the first from Queen Zarah and the second from The New Atalantis, we might say that the first has only an allegorical interest and not an independent narrative one. It figures Sarah Churchill as the domineering usurper trying to "tame" a series of ministers:

Nothing griev'd Zarah like this ungovernable Spirit of the Albigions, who wou'd not bear to think of being rid with a Side-Saddle, having had their Backs gall'd so much before in the Female Reign of Rolando. [Charles II]

But notwithstanding all these Difficulties, Zarah was resolved to mount on the Stirrup of Hippolito's [Marlborough's] Fame … and drive her Beasts forward by the help of Volpone's (Godolphin's] Rod … by this Means she got on the Backs of the most Able Pads in the whole Kingdom …, some of which she rid to Death, others she jaded, and some she rides still. (I, 110-11)

The episode goes on to satirize a group of noblemen in equestrian language, drawing on the commonplace icon-ographie trope of woman on top²⁶ to portray the she-favorite. Nothing about it invites the reader to linger on the "literal" level, the invented level of the horse-back-riding "fiction."

The passage from The New Atalantis is not allegorical in the same sense. It also gives us the she-favorite on top, but it endeavors to produce its own narrative and erotic interest in doing so. In this often-quoted episode, Hilaria, the fictionalized Duchess of Cleveland (mistress of Charles II) is being tricked by John Churchill into sleeping with his young friend, Henry, Baron Dover. At this point in the story, the Churchill figure, Count Fortunatus, wishes to be free of Hilaria, to whom he had been prostituting himself. Hilaria approaches the bed of Fortunatus, unwilling to perceive that the youth lying before her is not her lover.

… he had thrown himself upon the bed, pretending to sleep, with nothing on but his shirt and nightgown, which he had so indecently disposed that, slumbering as he appeared, his whole person stood confessed to the eyes of the amorous Duchess. His limbs were exactly formed, his skin shiningly white, and the pleasure the lady's graceful entrance gave him diffused joy and desire throughout all his form. His lovely eyes seemed to be closed, his face turned on one side (to favour the deceit) was obscured by the lace depending from the pillows on which he rested.

The Duchess, who had about her all those desires she expected to employ in the arms of the Count, was so blinded by 'em that at first she did not perceive the mistake, so that giving her eyes time to wander over beauties so inviting and which increased her flame, with an amorous sigh threw herself on the bed beside the desiring youth.

The ribbon of his shirt-neck not tied, the bosom (adorned with the finest lace) was open, upon which she fixed her charming mouth. Impatient, and finding that he did not awake, she raised her head and laid her lips to that part of his face that was revealed.

The burning lover thought it was now time to put an end to his pretended sleep. He clasped her in his arms, grasped her to his bosom; her own desires helped the deceit. She shut her eyes with a languishing sweetness, calling him by intervals, 'her dear Count', and 'her only lover', taking and giving a thousand kisses. He got possession of her person with so much transport that she owned all her former enjoyments were imperfect to the pleasure of this. (I, 305-6)

It is easy to see why The New Atalantis was a more popular book than Queen Zarah; although Zarah certainly contains some engaging vignettes,²⁷ nothing in it approaches the sheer voyeuristic eroticism of the later satire, a voyeurism mirrored in the lascivious gaze of Hilaria herself. The passage is practically a parable about the pleasures of reading The New Atalantis. Because the youth on the bed can either be looked at simply as a dazzling surface to be enjoyed, no matter who he is, or as a simulacrum, an allegory, of the Count, complete erotic indulgence is licensed, which makes "all … former enjoyments … imperfect [compared] to the pleasure of this." If one really wants to enjoy the book, one shouldn't try to sort out the levels of referentiality, but rather, like the Duchess, let one's desire aid the deceit and take one's pleasure both ways at once. This is a text that truly works on two levels: it can be equally enjoyed as mere story, suspending the referential issue, or as defamation. Such doubleness, moreover, makes the defamation all the more pleasurable, effective, and, indeed, explicit.

Thus we seem to have exactly reversed the normal way of explaining the dominance of allegorical writing in the eighteenth century and the emergence of densely realized fiction. Instead of maintaining that writers were trying to avoid the law through allegory, we could just as well argue that writers made themselves vulnerable to the law through it. And instead of arguing that purely literary fictions emerged out of evasive actions, out of the search for alibis, we might just as well argue that stories became more elaborate and compelling in themselves, and narrative technique became more "novelistic," because writers became more intent on effective political scandalmongering.

However, instead of holding one of these theses to the exclusion of the other, I am suggesting that it is because Delarivier Manley could vacillate between the poles of alibi and crime in developing her technique that she created a sheer excess of story, which cannot accurately be called "fiction" because it retains the pleasurable and controversial doubleness, the special way of seeming to point "outside," that belongs to allegory. The allegorical style thus met the paradoxical exigencies of her circumstances: it was partisan when viewed from one point of view, neutral when viewed from another, and remunerative when viewed from any. In a sense, then, Delarivier Manley could only win by this crossing of politics and fiction in the discourse of libel.

Politics and Femininity: The Double Cross

It should be apparent from the above passage that The New Atalantis's presentation of female eroticism was at least partly responsible for its irresistible crossing of politics and fiction. To get an adequate understanding of this moment in the history of women's writing, we should briefly note the ways in which the new political culture was simultaneously making use of and redefining femininity.

The simplest way to explain the crossing of partisan politics and female eroticism is to point to the coincidence of the female monarch and the rage for party. A woman on the throne meant that the nobles of the household (Groom of the Stole, Mistress of the Robe, Keeper of the Privy Purse, etc.) would also be women. Since these women controlled access to the Queen, the developing political parties and the increasingly powerful government ministers found themselves relying on and paying court to the ladies of the royal house-hold. Simultaneously, resentment at the power these women were perceived to hold permeated the partisan satires on the Queen's favorites.²⁸

The court, however, was more the occasion than the cause of the new emphasis on women in political dis-course. J. G. A. Pocock has pointed to a pattern of thought in this period linking changes in the form and concept of property to changes in the ideas of political entitlement and femininity. In making his now well-known distinction between civic and civil humanists, he claims that the former stressed "possession and civic virtue" and the latter "exchange and the civilization of the passions."²⁹ Moreover, Pocock implies that these different concepts of property were aligned with opposite valuations of female social discourse. The financial revolution of the 1690s, having turned the polity into a network of debtors and creditors, made the state heavily dependent on financial interests, and encouraged new habits of speculation,³⁰ also inspired both a newly positive assessment of women and new anxieties about them. For the new economic man in the eighteenth-century, according to Pocock, "was seen as on the whole a feminized, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his [stock market-induced] fantasies and appetites."³¹

Pocock thus presents those who rode the crest of that great surge in military and financial growth and who publicized its benefits as buoyed by new representations of the feminine. Civil humanists claimed that the very thing that had liberated the passions—commercial society—would, by providing relations of confidence between men, itself refine the passions. Similarly, a freer and more "rational" intercourse with women in civil society would at once teach women to contain their own passions and allow men to improve that "politeness" which was to be the new support and justification for a commercial civilization. The possibility of rational intercourse with women, therefore, was often promulgated by the same men who were beginning to extol the benefits of exchange, and hence after the 1690s women's public discourse was fastened to the idea of commerce in positive as well as negative new ways.

Politically, Manley was aligned with what Pocock calls the civic humanists, those who were most likely to express fears about the new toleration for private interests and women's influence, and her political alliances partly explain the kind of satire she wrote. However, we cannot place Manley squarely inside the Scriblerian milieu we associate with Swift, Pope and Arbuthnot, for the idea of women often functions in their discourse in ways that Manley at once uses and bends to her own self-ironizing purposes.³² Her authorial presentation, moreover, equally relies on the very civil humanist ideology it mocks.

Manley's own justification for having written The New Atalantis displays her complex method of associating and dissociating politics and femininity in her authorial self-portrait. In The Adventures of Rivetta, the fictionalized, third-person autobiography from which the account of Manley's libel hearing was taken at the opening of this essay, we are given a confession as well as a defense, and the confession helps us to understand the terms in which Manley, as a woman, was constituted a political being:

She [claimed] she was … out of humour with … a faction who were busy to enslave their sovereign and overturn the constitution, that she was proud of having more courage than had any of our sex and of throwing the first stone, which might give a hint for other persons of more capacity to examine the defects and vices of some men who took a delight to impose upon the world by the pretence of public good, whilst their true design was only to gratify and advance themselves. (II, 845)

Like most writers of the period, the heroine here dignifies her partisanship as general patriotism.

This passage, however, departs from its own high-mindedness when the author's gender emerges. The woman who is "proud … of throwing the first stone" is a figure out of a far less polite political tradition than that of the patriotic martyr. While it is only a rhetorical moment, the phrase nevertheless conjures the common figure of disorder, the woman at the head of the mob, both allegorical and real, who casts the first stone in the riot because her juridical status is ambiguous and she may not be held fully responsible for her action. In the very midst of claiming her political personhood, therefore, Manley raises the specter of the common disorderly woman, politically useful precisely because she cannot be taken seriously as a political agent. An image of the author as the female of the misogynist satirical literature thus intrudes into this high-minded confession, but in doing so she displays both her inappropriateness and her utility.

Moreover, the Biblical echo in the phrase "throw the first stone" reminds us of the sexual nature of Manley's satire; it was directed, especially, against adulterous women. This rhetorical linking of the author with the mob violence of women against women would have had wide resonance in the early eighteenth century, which saw both an enormous growth in London rioting to protest sexual misbehavior and a doubling of the percentage of rioters who were women." Manley thus links herself to an increasingly visible form of female public action against sexual impropriety; the association, however, further feminizes her satire and makes it seem less centrally political.

The fact that women's riots often punished sexual deviance did not erase their own impropriety, moreover. Nor did Manley's many claims to be a satirical scourge keep her from being perceived as a purveyor of licentiousness and a stimulator of the very passions she exposed. In the next paragraph of her confession, indeed, she admits the identity of impropriety between female victim and female accuser in her own works:

As to exposing those who had never injured her, she said she did no more by others than others had done by her, i.e., tattle of frailties. The Town had never shown her any indulgence but, on the contrary, reported tenfold against her in matters of which she was wholly innocent, whereas she did take up old stories that all the world had long since reported…. (II, 845-6)

The heroine is no longer in this passage a decisive individual political subject, full of patriotic fire; instead, she now depicts herself as a slandered woman who is evening a score in an altogether traditionally feminine manner: by "tattling of frailties," and telling "old stories," in short by gossiping. This argument resembles the fiction-alibi of the inquest, for it once again claims the general triviality of Manley's writing; as in her statement to the Secretary of State, she is simply a woman amusing herself with a "few amorous trifles." And, although she is willing to admit in this instance that she didn't completely make them up, she is no longer concerned with their objective truth, only with their prior circulation.

In Rivella's confession, then, as in her alibi, we find ourselves once again moving between political purposes and mere amusement, between high crimes and low excuses, but here the poles are quite clearly gendered. Once again, however, we can also observe a crossing of binary terms, the paradoxical ways in which politics and femininity implicate each other, even when womanhood is constructed within the misogynist assumptions of Augustan satire. Manley presents herself as politically useful because she is a disorderly woman vengefully gossiping about female "secrets" and therefore doing the sort of low and frivolous work considered to be beneath real politicians. Hence, she links her book's peculiar political efficacy to its femininity, which in turn decomposes its political nature.

The confession that presents this paradox is completely exculpatory. As she moves her explanation from patriotic fervor to feminine irresponsibility, she becomes all the more "innocent" in the archaic sense of "unaccountable." As a patriot she was behaving admirably, and as a woman she could not help herself. Although the political and sexual components of the confession work against each other both logically and imagistically, each contributes a kind of innocence, and the passage, by remaining unconscious of its contradictions, tries to add the two kinds of innocence together in order to achieve a complete vindication. We are to see her as both a high-minded stateswoman and a passionate, unruly creature. Her complete innocence is thus based on the juxtaposition/addition of her political and sexual impulses.

We should note, though, that The New Atalantis's female villains are guilty of the same crossing of feminine impulsiveness and politics that supposedly constitutes the author's innocence. Figures representing Lady Marlborough and the Duchess of Cleveland, for example, are exposed as having a dual and contradictory political/sexual nature that makes them doubly corrupt, whereas Manley's made her doubly innocent. We are faced in the text of The New Atalantis, as in the confession in Rivetta, with the undeniable similarity between the satirist and the satirized, which is partly owing, as we've seen, to the concept of womanhood supplied by the Juvenalian tradition, but which also derives from another source: Manley's own dependence on the very civil ideal she seems to be satirizing.

When she exposes the "secret" underside of the new idea of social privacy, the refinement of her victims as mere lechery, their valued personal intercourse as criminal conversation, their cultivation and patronage of the arts as bribery, she invokes not some civic humanist ideal of independent masculine virtue but the very ideas of cultivated exchange, especially between the sexes, that she simultaneously seems to be exposing as hypocritical. Moreover, she betrays her own self-interested reasons for subscribing to those ideas. For example, her allegorical narrator, Lady Intelligence, often makes satirical attacks that conclude with a racy, libertine one-upmanship, as in this criticism of the Duke of Marlborough for not paying his mistresses directly:

It appears strange to me [says Lady Intelligence], that considering the Count's [Marlborough's] Power and Riches, Daphne [Catherine Trotter] did not make her Fortune by His Fondness. But I think there yet wants an Example of elevated Generosity in him, to any of his Mistresses, tho' the World can't dispute but that he has had many: His ways to pay the Favour, being to desire the lady to study if there is any thing in his Power, by which he may oblige any Relation or Friend of hers; and that he will not fail to grant it. Thus every way a Husband of his Money, his Reputation and Grandeur procure him the good Fortune he desires: Tho' were the Ladies with whom he has a mind to converse of my Taste, they would think his own very handsome Person a Reward sufficient for all the Charms they can bestow. (I, 585-6)

The passage cleverly combines charges of stinginess and corrupt influence trading as it comically implies that the Duke's dealings with his mistresses should have been more commercial, indeed that in "preferring" the husband, thus "husbanding" his money (as she puns), the Duke has been less than a perfect gentleman. But then, in order to demonstrate how even the language of fair exchange can and should be translated into that of taste and cultivation, Lady Intelligence announces her own generous and tasteful willingness to make love to Marlborough for nothing. Thus the female satirist imaginatively substitutes herself for Catherine Trotter, a Whig writer of the period and the original object of the satire. The satirized are exposed as lustful and greedy under their politeness, but the satirist playfully converts her lust and ambition into an instance of Taste in Conversation. Lady Intelligence is a figure for the author here, so the passage creates the effect of a satirist endlessly resubscribing to the values of the social interactions she mocks.

Much of the humor of The New Atalantis resides in these parallels and resemblances between satirized and satirist,³⁴ and most of them hinge on either the satirist's erotic desires or her hopes for political patronage. In some instances, the two forms of exchange are explicitly linked, and the impossibility of distinguishing between them, as in the above passage, is the point of the joke. In another sequence, for example, Marlborough is accused of being stingy with both his mistresses and his writers, requiring one poet to leave a receipt for two pieces of silver paid for his panegyric. This report is immediately followed (I, 450-1) by the author's panegyric to the Tory Duke of Beaumond, whom she praises for his patriotism, generosity, and (she emphasizes) irresistible personal attractions.

Politics and femininity are thus interwoven in a series of maneuvers that depend on the terms' normative mutual exclusion. The New Atalantis manages to display the available ways of crossing women and politics, and then to make those crossings themselves the object of satire. Hence although femininity, like fiction, can always be opposed to Manley's politics as its excuse, it can also be exposed as the deep truth of political corruption. Femininity has, in short, the same odd potential for exculpation and incrimination that we noted in the concept of fiction. Delarivier Manley, as a Tory scandalmonger impelled by her gender toward the rhetoric of civil humanism, was bound to use it both ways.

Fictional Eroticism and the Challenge to Scandal

So far I have tried to show that, inside the generic assumptions of Manley's scandalous allegories, fiction and femininity had similarly paradoxical relationships to politics. This positional parallel alone, I've been suggesting, created a strong link between them. Finally, however, I would like to note that The New Atalantis reflects on this very connection between fictionality and femininity in order to remind us of the crucial differences between the scandalous political text we are reading and women's inconsequential erotic fantasies.

Some of the most sensational episodes of The New Atalantis may be read as dramatizations of the tension between the referential political significance of Manley's allegories and the possibility of reading them as merely fictional "amorous trifles." The episodes might be said to reverse the procedure of the hearing by putting the alibi of feminine erotic fictionality on trial, satirizing a drive on the part of certain ladies for forms of feminine eroticism that would be meaningless, "fictional" pleasures that would escape reference, consequence, and, therefore, scandal. The ladies thus practice a kind of sedition against the text they inhabit by attempting to elude the rules of significance and reference proper to scandalous allegories.

In the stories of what Lady Intelligence calls "the New Cabal," we see one such evasive strategy: the attempt by a group of ladies to substitute romantic attachments between women for heterosexual intrigues. The relationships among the women of the New Cabal are designed, we are told, to thwart scandal by substituting an innocent, fictional eroticism for guilty, real (heterosexual) sexuality. Lady Intelligence herself is, ironically, the spokeswoman for the notion that amorous relations between women escape the reach of scandal because they "could only subsist in imagination." By their nature, they are a form of play acting that cannot "wound [a lady's] chastity" (I, 575-6).

But the stories of the New Cabal also continually point out the precariousness of such "pure" fictions that would allow women to indulge themselves erotically without risking their reputations. The pleasures these women seek, the narrator implies, rest on an inherently unstable representational system. Lady Intelligence tells us that they "do not in reality love Men; but doat on the Representations of Men in Women" (I, 738). The women are not loved as women, neither are they loved as a men, but as cross-dressed representations. A noble widow, for example,

fell in Love with one of the fair Female Comedians, when she was acting the Part of a Young Lover and a Libertine. The Widow sent for the Girl, and made her very considerable Presents, order'd her Picture, in that Dress, to be taken at length, by one of the best Hands, and carried her to remain with her … at her Villa. (I, 739)

At length, however, the actress disappoints the lady by insisting that their play have a meaning:

The Widow … assur'd her of her Tenderness and Amity; she even proceeded to gentle squeezes and embraces; nothing cou'd be more innocently indearing than her transports! The Comedian was at a loss to know [not] only how to merit so many favours but also the meaning of 'em…. [She] told the Lady she did not like those hugs and indearments from her own Sex …; did they come from a man, she should be able to guess at his Design, but here she was at a loss—." (I, 740)

The widow's behavior, indeed, has no "meaning" of the sort the actress seeks, and insisting on one only impresses the lack of the significant member on the widow's consciousness, thereby putting the actress further "at a loss." By refusing to be content with representation and play, to suspend her disbelief, the actress spoils the possibility of pleasure, and the widow then appropriately punishes her by symbolically castrating her portrait, the representation of the actress representing a man:

When [the widow] was return'd to her House in Town, to show the lurkings of her malice, tho' but in Effigy, she caus'd the Comedian's Picture to be let down, and with her own Hand cut out the Face; so stamp'd upon and abus'd, sent it back to her whom it represented…. (I, 740)

Because she insisted on seeing their fiction as empty, the actress is confronted with her own message; her face cut out of the portrait, she becomes a figure for the blankness of representation.

The widow and the uncooperative actress thus play out what we might see as a conflict between starkly opposed versions of scandal and fiction. The actress, who has not been given an adequate monetary substitute for reality, tries to read the widow's play as if its whole substance resided outside of itself, as if it were supposed to be merely decoded or seen through, as if it were just a screen for some "meaning" on the other side of representation. Hence, she receives, along with the picture of herself as the blankness of representation, the widow's message that the actress, "had … made it a Scandal to her House to have such a Picture seen in it." The actress had the chance to indulge innocently in the widow's willed illusion of fiction but instead chose the guilty, penetrating vision of a crude form of allegorical scandal.

Of course, as I have already noted, the actress's insistence on "meaning" differs markedly from the scandalous referentiality of The New Atalantis, where the pleasures of the text are often likened to an erotic doublevision in which characters perceive each other as simultaneously disguised and unmasked, where representation and reference try to supplement rather than supplant each other. But the widow's desire to inhabit a completely non-referential fictional world is similarly impermissible within the generic rules of this text. The episode of the widow and the actress reflects not only on the precariousness of "pure" fiction but also on its thinness as an imaginative experience. The widow's insistence on one-dimensional fiction calls forth an equally one-dimensional demand for scandalous referentiality. If the widow had achieved her illusion, it would have been, in The New Atalantis's terms, insignificant. The episode thus suggests that the New Cabal's attempt to escape from the narrative conditions of scandal through feminine fictions threatens to subtract significance from fiction and play from scandal, impoverishing both. By dramatizing the resistance to political scandal, The New Atalantis plays out and discredits what it identifies as the feminine impulse toward pure fiction, while at the same time it appropriates fiction as one of its own proper allegorical techniques. The attempted resistance nevertheless stands as a reminder of the tension between fiction and femininity, on the one hand, and politics, on the other. But to say this is merely to repeat what I've been arguing all along, that in Manley's works, femaleness and fictionality strain away from politics in the very process of being filtered through it.

The separation, which Manley had no pressing reason to effect, did finally take place; over the next several decades, the link between fiction and politics slackened as readers became increasingly interested in stories about nobody. Women readers and writers, moreover, were crucially important in thus transforming the cultural significance of fiction.³⁵ However, in the Queen Anne period, the opposition between politics and women's fictions can only be discerned through the powerful impropriety of their scandalous crossings.

Notes

¹ I am convinced by Patricia Koster's argument that there is no evidence for believing Manley's first name was "Mary." See "Delariviere Manley and the DNB," Eighteenth Century Life 3 (1977): 106-111. Furthermore, I follow Fidelis Morgan's lead in spelling Manley's Christian name "Delarivier" because that is the way the author consistently spelled it. See A Woman of No Character: An Autobiography of Mrs. Manley (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 14.

² Information about Manley's arrest and questioning comes from two sources: Narcissus Luttrell's A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs (London, 1857), pp. 505-8 and 546; and Manley's own fictionalized autobiography, The Adventures of Rivetta; or, The History of the Author of the Atalantis (London: 1714), pp. 108-16. Excerpts from both accounts are brought together in Fidelis Morgan, pp. 146-51. Manley apparently surrendered herself on October 29, 1709, after a Secretary of State's warrant had been issued against her, and her "publishers and printers" had already been detained. She was questioned in the secretary's office; four days later the publishers and printer were discharged, but Manley remained in custody until November 7th, when she was released on bail. Her trial was heard on February 11, 1710, at the Queen's Bench Court; she was discharged.

³ Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Private Correspondence (London, 1838), p. 237.

⁴ I draw this inference from Manley's description of the questioning, quoted below, and from Sarah Churchill's letter to the Queen, which identifies Harley, Peterborough, and Mrs. Masham as Manley's sources of information and financial support: "The woman that has been put upon writing it, and the printer, have been in custody, and are now under prosecution. It has appeared that she kept correspondence with two of her favourite persons in the book, My Lord Peterborough and Mr. Harley, and I think it is to be suspected that she may have had some dealing with Mrs. Masham, who is called Hilaria." Ibid., p. 236.

⁵The Adventures of Rivetta, or The History of the author of Atalantis with secret memoirs and characters of several considerable persons, her contemporaries (London: 1714); rpt. in The Novels of Mary Delariviere Manley, ed. Patricia Köster, vol. II, p. 849. All quotations from Manley's works are taken from this edition. Page numbers are given in the text and refer to Köster's pagination.

⁶ For the evidence that Manley did have highly-placed sources, see Gwendolyn B. Needham, "Mary de la Riviere Manley, Tory Defender," Huntington Library Quarterly 12 (1949): 253-88.

⁷General Postscript, being an Extract of all that is most material from the Foreign and English Newspapers, with Remarks upon the 'Observator,' 'Review,' 'Tatlers,' and the Rest of the Scribblers, in a Dialogue between Novel and Scandal (London: Sept. 27, 1709); quoted in John Wilson Bowyer, The Celebrated Mrs. Catliver (Durham, N.C.: 1952), p. 125.

⁸ John Richetti's discussion of Manley in Popular Fiction Before Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 119-53, turned critical attention away from her writings as scandalous histories toward their role in the construction of the myth that female innocence is constantly besieged by an egotistical and corrupt masculinity. The mythic and the fictional are roughly equivalent concepts for Richetti, and hence Manley's works are fictional despite their contemporary referentiality. Richetti's analysis had the merit of recognizing Manley's importance in developing narrative patterns that would later be incorporated into the novel, but it also somewhat anachronistically imposed the concept of fiction on Manley's work retroactively. More recent discussions tend to follow Richetti's lead in this matter; Jerry Beasley basically repeats the same argument about beleaguered femininity, while noting that Manley exploits the pattern for political purposes. See "Politics and Moral Idealism: The Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists," in Fetter'd Or Free?, eds. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 223-25. Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 53-61, 113-16, Michael McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel, 1660-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 232-33, and Jacqueline Pearson's The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642-1737 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 193-95, all attempt to place Manley in various typologies of narrative fiction. Even Delores Palomo, who argues vigorously against Richetti's particular analysis, allows his generic identification to stand. Indeed, she seems almost embarrassed to mention at one point that "Contemporaries recognized the authenticity of this and other stories in her secret histories, and in fact her success resulted partly from the presumption that she told real stories about real people." See "A Woman Writer and the Scholars: A Review of Mary Manley's Reputation," Women and Literature 6:1 (Spring, 1978): 44.

⁹ For accounts of the British printing industry, its modes of regulation, and the general effects of the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695, see Marjorie Plant, The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books (London: G. Allen Unwin, 1939), especially pp. 115-21; Frank Arthur Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling. Part One: From the Earliest Times to 1870 (London: Cape, 1974), especially pp. 127-47; and Graham Pollard, "The English Market for Printed Books," Publishing History 4 (1978): 7-48.

¹⁰ For an overview of seditious libel prosecutions in the early eighteenth century, see Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 34-74, and Laurence Hanson, The Government and the Press, 1695-1763 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936).

¹¹ C. R. Kropf has a very useful summary of the law in his essay "Libel and Satire in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, 2 (1974-5): 153-68. See also Hanson, pp. 7-35.

¹² For discussions of this development, see David Harrison Stevens, Party Politics and English Journalism, 1702-1742 (Madison, Wis.: Banta, 1916); and J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).

¹³ "In such circumstances," notes A. S. Collins, "the relation of author to publisher existed on a very insecure basis. How could a bookseller pay highly for the rights to a work whose profits another might steal from him by a cheaper edition?" Authorship in the Days of Johnson: Being a Study of the Relation Between Author, Patron, Publisher and Public 1726-1780 (London: R. Holden & Co. Ltd., 1927), p. 8.

¹⁴ Stevens, pp. 1-4. W. A. Speck, however, points out that subscription lists were dominated by the peerage in the early eighteenth century and that subscriptions were often themselves a vehicle for political patronage. See "Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription, 1700-1750," in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin's 1982), pp. 47-68.

¹⁵ See Collins on patronage in this period, pp. 114-18, and pp. 214-21; see also Downie's Robert Harley and his Jonathan Swift: Political Writer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), passim.

¹⁶The Man of Taste (rpt. Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 8.

¹⁷ Stevens, p. 17.

¹⁸ "Mrs. Dela Manley to [the Earl of Oxford]," HMC Portland 5:55.

¹⁹ C. R. Kropf s very informative essay views the relationship between satirical technique and libel in these terms.

²⁰The Importance of the Guardian Considered, in Political Tracts, 1713-1719, ed. Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), pp. 14-15. See the discussion of this passage in Hanson, p. 25.

²¹ For example, see Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning, p. 57. See also the more sophisticated reading of Swift that regards his works as purposely elusive mockeries of other authors' allegorizing and the allegoryhunting of the prosecutors in Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions; The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 149-153. Bertrand A. Goldgar, however, in Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742 (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1976), pp. 49-63, demonstrates that parts of Gulliver's Travels were immediately received as obvious personal satire.

²² See Kropf, p. 157-9.

²³ Quoted in Thomas, p. 58.

²⁴ Ibid. Thomas quotes this passage as the "interpretation [of the law] accepted" when Manley was prosecuted (pp. 58-9), but he does not comment on the passage or note the paradox involved in the concept of innuendo to which it draws attention: that in cases of abusive allegory, the same evidence may be cited as either exonerating or incriminating.

²⁵ It is for this reason that Lennard Davis's very helpful discussion of the news-novel matrix is somewhat too simple. According to Davis, in the early eighteenth century one had to claim that books of "news" were fictional and works of fiction were "true." The very use of the word "fiction," however, could often be a clue to the contemporary reference of the work.

²⁶ For a discussion of this trope and its functions in early modern Europe see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top: Symbolic Sexual Inversion and Political Disorder in Early Modern Europe," in The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, ed. Barbara Babcock (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 147-90.

²⁷ A comparable scene in Queen Zarah has Hippolito (John Churchill) encounter the young Zarah (then Sarah Jennings) where he expects to find Clelia (the Duchess of Cleveland), but although the setting is described (actually translated directly from Sebastian de Bremond's earlier Histoire scandaleuse, Hattige, ou Les Amours du Roy de Tamara (Paris: 1676), p. 69), the young Zarah is not. Moreover, Hippolito recognizes Zarah immediately, so that the themes of double vision and disguise are absent,, whereas they recur frequently in The New Atalantis. See, for example, II, 662-65, as well as the passages cited at the end of this essay.

²⁸ Manley's attacks on Sarah Churchill were matched by equally scandalous Whig satires on Abigail Masham when she became the Queen's favorite. If Churchill was accused of being a whore, Masham was accused of lesbianism. See, for example, John Dunton's King Abigail: or, the Secret Reign of the She-Favourite, Detected, and Applied: In a Sermon Upon these Words, "And Women rule over them" Isa. 3.12 (London, 1715). For a general discussion of English satires on women and English uses of Juvenalian rhetoric, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky Press, 1984).

²⁹ "The Mobility of Property," Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 115.

³⁰ For a detailed description of this process, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).

³¹ "Mobility of Property," p. 114.

³² For studies of the functions of "the feminine" in Swift and Pope, see Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), passim., and Nussbaum, pp. 94-116 and 137-58.

³³ Robert B. Shoemaker, "The London 'Mob' in the Early Eighteenth Century," Journal of British Studies 26 (July 1987): 285.

³⁴ The irony of The New Atalantis has gone largely unremarked since John Richetti directed the attention of critics to the recurrent seduction motif, thereby giving the impression that Manley's narrators vacillate between over-heated prurience and outraged virtue. But in fact Manley structures her book so that the moral pretentions of the two allegorical figures, Virtue and Astrea, are frequently deflated by the interjections of the main narrator, Lady Intelligence, who is a figure for scandal itself, and Intelligence's self-interested motivations are often exposed. Two studies that have noted Manley's irony without concentrating on its self-inclusive quality are Delores Palomo's, op. cit., and Janet Todd's The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 84-100.

³⁵ For arguments detailing the later association between femininity and the discursive practices of fiction, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Ev'ry Woman is at Heart a Rake," Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (Fall, 1974): 27-46; and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), passim.