SOURCE: "Political Crimes and Fictional Alibis: The Case of Delarivier Manley," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, Summer, 1990, pp. 502-21.

In the essay that follows, Gallagher analyzes the paradoxical relationship between politics, gender, and scandal fiction in Manley's novels. The critic proposes that while Manley, like her contemporaries, used allegory to protect herself from prosecution, she developed this technique further by shaping fictional circumstances into a narrative that could be read for its own enjoyment as well as its slanderous implications.

When Delarivier¹ Manley was arrested for seditious libel in 1709, according to her later account of the inquest, fiction was her alibi.² She had written Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean (1709), the provocative allegorical satire on sexual and political corruption among the Whigs who then controlled the government of Queen Anne. Like an earlier...