Nobody's Story

In her biographical work, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1920 (1994), American author and professor Catherine Gallagher chronicles the lives and works of five influential women writers. Her subjects include Restoration era playwrights Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, Scottish author and poet Charlotte Lennox, English satirical novelist Frances Burney, and Anglo-Irish realist novelist Maria Edgeworth.

Aphra Behn was one of the first European women to earn a living as a writer. Though little is known about Behn's early life, records indicate that she was baptized in 1640 amid the lead-up to the English Civil War. According to her own writings, Behn traveled as a young woman to the English colony of Willoughbyland in what is now Suriname in South America. There, she reportedly met an African slave leader whose story served as the basis for her short prose work Oroonoko. Upon her return to England in 1664, the court of King Charles II recruited Behn to work as a political spy in Antwerp during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. She was reportedly tasked with becoming intimate with the son of one of the men who killed King Charles I with the aim of convincing him to become a double agent.

King Charles II was either slow to pay Behn or did not pay her at all for her espionage efforts. To stay out of debtors' prison, Behn obtained employment from a pair of theater companies as a scribe. During the 1670s and 1680s, Behn wrote a number of romances and comic plays. The most popular of these was The Rover, a revision of an earlier Thomas Killigrew play about the amorous exploits of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples during Carnival. England's first Poet Laureate John Dryden, one of Behn's contemporaries, wrote that her version "lacks the manly vitality of Killigrew's play, but shows greater refinement of expression." After a life dedicated to, in her own words, "pleasure and poetry," Behn died in 1689 beset by poverty and debt.



Like Behn, most of what is known about Delarivier Manley's early life comes from her own writing. Born sometime between 1663 and 1670, Manley was the third of six children sired by a royalist army officer. Upon the death of her father, Manley became the ward of her cousin John Manley, a member of Parliament. The two later married and had a child, even though John was already married to a Cornish heiress. In 1694, Manley left John to live with Barbara Villiers, the one-time mistress of Charles II. Villiers expelled Manley after just six months, having suspected Manley of trying to seduce her son. Over the next few years, Manley traveled England and began to write plays. She responded to criticism of her early plays by anonymously writing a satirical work called The Female Wits in which she mocked her own work under a pseudonym. She continued to find notoriety and scandal as a satirist, even being arrested by authorities for her vicious ridicule of the British politician Sidney Godolphin. Charges of libel were eventually dismissed after Manley insisted that any resemblance between her characters and real individuals was purely coincidental. She continued to court controversy with satirical novels and political pamphlets until her death in 1724.

The daughter of a Scottish captain in the British Army, Charlotte Lennox was born around 1730. During her young adulthood, Lennox worked as a companion to various noblewomen. After a failed marriage to "an indigenous and shiftless Scot," Lennox sought a career as an actor and a poet. Although many of her female literary peers disliked her, Lennox won the approval of prominent male writers such as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson who helped fund the publication of her most enduring work, 1752's The Female Quixote. While the book was published anonymously, the identity of its writer was an open secret. Nevertheless, the lack of a formal association with the book during her lifetime helped lead to an erasure of Lennox from the historical record that Gallagher seeks to correct. After officially separating from her husband in 1793, Lennox lived the rest of her life in "solitary penury" before dying in 1804.

Born in 1752, Frances Burney wrote four novels in her lifetime, most notably 1778's Evelina. Like many of the women writers chronicled here, Burney published it anonymously owing to the fact that reading novels—let alone writing them—was frowned upon for women of high social status. Gallagher argues that Evelina and her other novels highly influenced the satirical novelists of social manners that would gain fame in the 19th century, including Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. After a long and respected career, Burney died at the age of eighty-seven in 1840.



Finally, Gallagher profiles Maria Edgeworth. Born in 1768, Edgeworth became widely known for both children's and adult literature. With 1796's short story collection The Parent's Assistant, Edgeworth became one of the earliest authors to write realist children's literature that dealt with real issues facing youth as opposed to fantastical scenarios. Her first full-length novel was 1801's Belinda, which garnered a great deal of controversy for its depiction of an interracial marriage. After some Jewish readers perceived Edgeworth's 1812 novel The Absentee as having anti-Semitic undertones, she wrote Harrington, a book credited with being one of the earliest English novels to feature a sympathetic Jewish character. Edgeworth suffered a fatal heart attack in 1849.

Nobody's Story is an extraordinarily valuable book that seeks to correct the erasure of women from the history of English literature.