Mary Pix writes her first play, a…

Mary Pix writes her first play, a comedy, The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband (1696).

There is some indication that she may have been by then reconciled with her husband, for a time.

Mary was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School; her father Roger died when she was very young, but Mary and her mother had continued to live in the schoolhouse after his death.

She was courted by her father’s successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, just one year after the mysterious fire that burned the schoolhouse.

Mary Griffiths (her maiden name) had married George Pix, a merchant, and moved to his country state in Kent.

Her first son, George, died very young, but the next year they moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William.

While living in London and when she is thirty, she becomes a professional writer, with her tragedy Ibrahim (1695-6).

At first she associates herself with two other playwrights of the time, Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter, reaching a great success that grants them some criticism in the form of an anonymous satirical play The Female Wits (1696).

Mary Pix appears as “Mrs. Wellfed one that represents a fat, female author. A good rather sociable, well-matured companion that would not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers in a hand” (From The Female Wits, Morgan, 1981: 392).

She is depicted as an ignorant woman, but amiable and unpretentious and she is summed up in the play as “foolish and openhearted” (From The Female Wits, Morgan, 1981: 392) Her first play had been put on stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1696, but when that same theatrical company performs The Female Wits she changes to Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn, born to Scottish parents living in London, had been raised Protestant but converted to Roman Catholicism at an early age.

After an illustrious career, her father, navy captain David Trotter, died of the plague in 1684, leaving his family in financial jeopardy.

Catharine, a precocious, physically attractive, and largely self-educated young woman, had had her first novel (The Adventures of a Young Lady, later retitled Olinda’s Adventures) published anonymously in 1693, when she was but fourteen years old.

Her first published play, Agnes de Castro (a verse dramatization of Aphra Behn's story of the same title), had been staged two years later.

She is in 1696 famously satirized alongside Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix in the anonymous play, The Female Wits.

In it, Trotter is lampooned in the figure of “Calista, a lady who pretends to the learned languages and assumes to herself the name of critic.” Delariviere Manley was probably born in Jersey, the third of six children of Sir Roger Manley, a royalist army officer and historian, and a woman from the Spanish Netherlands, who died when Delarivier was young.

It seems that she and her sister Cornelia moved with their father to his various army postings.

After their father's death in 1687, the girls had become wards of their cousin, John Manley (1654–1713), a Tory MP.

John Manley had married a Cornish heiress and, later, bigamously, had married Delarivier.

They had a son in 1691, also named John.

Manley had left her husband in January 1694, and gone to live with Barbara Villiers, the 1st Duchess of Cleveland, at one time the mistress of Charles II.

She remained there only six months, at which time she was expelled by the duchess for allegedly flirting with her son.

Manley travels extensively in England, principally in the southwest, during the period of 1694–1696.