Delarivière Manley, controversial Tory satirist, was the author of two sensational scandal chronicles read by nearly everyone in their day, The Secret History, of Queen Zarah (1705) and the New Atalantis (1709-1710). Her personal life, nearly as shocking at times as her fiction, outraged many of her contemporaries, but she nevertheless managed to be regarded as a clever writer and a skillful, effective polemicist whose efforts may have helped to topple the Whig ministers from power in 1710. Manley has always held a minor but important place as contributor to the hot political debates of the last years of the reign of Queen Anne. For students of the early development of the English novel, however, her work possesses a related but different and more enduring kind of interest that has only in recent years begun to be acknowledged and seriously discussed. By turning her imagination loose upon the...