Abstract
In the eighteenth century, Susanna Centlivre (c. 1669–1723) was the most performed English playwright after Shakespeare. In the late 1690s, however, she was an obscure young woman with a chequered past trying to make her way in London’s commercial literary world. She made her London literary debut in 1700 by having a selection of her ‘private’ letters published in a miscellaneous collection of prose and verse collected by Tom Brown, Familiar and Courtly Letters, Written by Monsieur Voiture … to which is added a Collection of Letters of Friendship, and other Occasional Letters, Written by Mr. Dryden, Mr. Wycherley etc. This chapter will explore two features of this event: the strategic use of Centlivre’s letters as autobiographical documents in an initial step towards the creation of a commercial persona, one modelled on the posthumous marketing of Aphra Behn’s works, and how Centlivre and other women embraced new technologies for conveying their material texts to London printers and booksellers at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning decades of the eighteenth century to enter the public literary market place, for celebrity, profit or both.
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Notes
See Linda Mitchell, ‘Entertainment and Instruction: Women’s Roles in the English Epistolary Tradition’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 55 (2003): 331–47 and Konstantin Dierks, ‘Letter Manuals, Literary Innovation, and the Problem of Defining Genre in Anglo-American Epistolary Instruction, 1568–1800’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 94.4 (2000): 541–50.
Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 47.
For a discussion of how meaning was contained in the formatting and physical nature of early modern women’s handwritten letters, see James Daybell, ‘“Ples Acsept Thes My Skrybled Lynes”: The Construction and Conventions of Women’s Letters in England, 1540–1603’, Quidditas, 20 (1999): 207–23.
See Amy Elizabeth Smith, ‘Naming the Un-“Familiar”: Formal Letters and Travel Narratives in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Review of English Studies, 54 (2003): 178–202 for a good overview of the development of the ‘formal’ letter during this period.
Janet Todd, ‘Fatal Fluency: Behn’s Fiction and the Restoration Letter’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (2000): 417–34, at 418.
Henry Care, The Female Secretary (London: T. Ratcliffe, and M. Daniel, 1671).
Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Care, Henry (1646/7–1688)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
For a £5 per year fee, such newsletters gathered together information about people and events from the court and the town that was not published in the gazettes of the time and sent it to the subscriber in a handwritten letter, requesting that the receiver in turn respond with any foreign news or interesting information that had yet to be printed so that it could be published in the London Gazette. J. G. Muddiman, The King’s Journalist 1659–1689: Studies in the Reign of Charles II (London: John Lane and the Bodley Head, 1923), pp. 144–67.
Stanley Morrison, Ichabod Dawks and his News-Letter with an Account of the Dawks Family of Booksellers and Stationers 1635–1731 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 25.
The Athenian Gazette, see also Gilbert D. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1972) and Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade (New York: Garland Publications, 1976).
John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, 2 vols (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), I, p. 189.
Berth-Monica Stearns, ‘The First English Periodical for Women’, Modern Philology, 28 (1930): 45–59.
For further history of the Penny Post and the British Postal system during the early part of the eighteenth century, see George Brumell, The Local Posts of London 1680–1840 (1938) and T. Todd, William Dockwra and the Rest of the Undertakers; The Story of the London Penny Post (1952).
Margaret J. M Ezell, ‘The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices’, Modern Philology, 89 (1992): 323–40.
Letters of Love and Gallantry … All Written by Ladies (London: Samuel Briscoe, 1693), A2r-v. For the identification of Trotter as Olinda, see Anne Kelley, ed., Catharine Trotter’s The Adventures of a Young Lady and other works (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), p. 2.
Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 95.
For the controversies surrounding the authorship of this text, see F. C. Green, ‘Who Was the Author of the Lettres portugaises?’, Modern Language Review, 21 (1926): 159–67.
Jacques Rougeot, ‘Un Ouvrage inconnu de l’auteur des Lettres portugaises’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 101 (1961): 23–36.
A good recent overview of the controversy is found in Anna Klobucka, The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000).
An alternative view, arguing that they are indeed written by Mariana, is presented in Cyr Myriam, Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a Seventeenth-Century Forbidden Love (London: Hyperion Books, 2006).
On Briscoe’s financial difficulties, see Benjamin Boyce, Tom Brown of Facetious Memory: Grub Street in the Age of Dryden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 116, n. 24.
Janet Todd, ed., The Works of Aphra Behn, 7 vols (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Press, 1992–6), III, p. 391.
See Todd, Works, III, p. x. On Briscoe’s negative impact on Behn’s subsequent reputation, see Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 12.
For a more positive view, Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 32–40.
Ruth Salvaggio, ‘Aphra Behn’s Love: Fiction, Letters, and Desire’, in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory and Criticism, ed. Heidi Hutner (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 253–70, at 254.
See Felicity Nussbuam, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007). For a different perspective on the creation of professional personas by late seventeenth-century women, see Helen Draper’s discussion of the ways in which the seventeenth-century London artist Mary Beale used her domestic self-portraits and circulated manuscript texts on friendship in the 1670s to create a virtuous public persona that permitted her to support her family as a professional portrait painter. ‘“Her Painting of Apricots”: The Invisibility of Mary Beale (1633–1699)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48 (2012): 389–405.
Felicity Nussbaum, ‘Actresses and the Economics of Celebrity, 1700–1800’, in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, eds Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 148–68, at 150.
Brian Winston, Messages: Free Expression, Media and the West from Gutenberg to Google (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 208–9.
J. Milling, ‘Centlivre, Susanna (bap. 1669?, d. 1723)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007).
John Wilson Bowyer, The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952), pp. 18–19.
Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Pope, Alexander (1688–1744)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008).
Dana Goodyear, ‘Letter from Japan: I ♥ Novels’, The New Yorker (22 December 2008), p. 63.
Rita Raley, ‘Walk this Way: Mobile Narratives as Composed Experience’, in Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genre, eds Jorgan Schafer and Peter Dendolla (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), pp. 299–316, at 302.
Norimitsu Onishi, ‘Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular’, The New York Times (20 January 2008), http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html [accessed 19 October 2013].
Barry Yourgrau, ‘Thumb Novels: Mobile Phone Fiction’, Independent (29 July 2009), http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/thumb-novels-mobile-phone-fiction-1763849.html [accessed 19 October 2013].
See Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Reading Pseudonyms in Seventeenth-Century English Coterie Literature’, Essays in Literature, 21 (1994): 14–25.
Chris Elliott, ‘The Readers’ editor on … being caught by a fake online persona’, The Guardian (20 October 2013), http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/20/caught-out-by-fake-online-persona.
Jack Werner, ‘Who is Veronika?’, The Metro (7 October 2013), http://www.metro.se/veronika/who-is-veronika/EVHmja!WDI1wIPdrXLs6/[accessed 21 October 2013].
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© 2014 Margaret J. M. Ezell
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Ezell, M.J.M. (2014). Late Seventeenth-Century Women Writers and the Penny Post: Early Social Media Forms and Access to Celebrity. In: Pender, P., Smith, R. (eds) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_8
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