SOURCE: "Life after Sex: Delarivier Manley," in The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction 1660-1800, Virago Press, 1989, pp. 84-98.

In the following excerpt, Todd examines Manley's treatment of the conventional male linkage of women writers and whores, in her time period. Todd asserts that in The Adventures of Rivella the author subverts this identification by depicting a female writer who has learned the social and sexual power of words. She also surveys Manley's other fiction, remarking on her use of alternating narrative voices, her views on the function of literature, and her notions of how women must act in order to survive in a world that is both complex and oppressive.

The nastiness of women for male satirists was supremely expressed in the sexual act and its aftermath: male disillusion, impotence and venereal disease. A comfort in this situation was the common narrative of female distress following...