SOURCE: Introduction to A Woman of No Character: An Autobiography of Mrs. Manley, Faber and Faber, 1986, pp. 17-23.

In the essay below, Morgan provides an overview of Manley's autobiographical writings, judging them generally honest and forthright, even though they were all presented in fictional form. The critic also calls attention to Manley's popularity in her own lifetime and the influence of her work on prose writers of the later eighteenth century.

I first came upon the autobiographical writings of Mrs Delarivier Manley in my research for The Female Wits. So much larger than life do they read that I was unsurprised when dependable reference works dismissed them as pure fiction.

'The testimony of Mrs Manley is of course wholly valueless,' thought a nineteenth-century scholar. This century Winston S. Churchill described her works as 'the lying inventions of a prurient and filthy underworld, served up to those who...