A common misconception about literary history is that women weren’t writing professionally or significantly before Jane Austen. To talk about women’s historical oppression, Virginia Woolf famously conjured up an imaginary sister for William Shakespeare, naming her Judith in A Room of One’s Own in 1929. But in the early eighteenth century, when Queen Anne ruled Great Britain, three women authors later to be popularly known as “the fair triumvirate of wit” ruled the stage, the page, and the press: poet/playwright/novelist, travel writer, and supposed international spy Aphra Behn; Eliza Haywood, pioneering romance novelist and (later) editor and chief contributor to the first British periodical marketed to and written by women, the Female Spectator; and author, playwright, and political pamphleteer Delarivier Manley. If not for archaeological digs undertaken by feminist critics and historians inspired by the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, these real-life Judith Shakespeares would have remained buried under years of hyper-fixation on male writers, even though they were three of the most influential writers of their time, and their literary styles and techniques popularized the genre we now call creative nonfiction.
In 1709, when Manley published her two-part book, , mixing literary journalism, romance, and political satire, everyone understood the events she described, which laid bare politicians’ dealings in the boardroom and the bedroom, to be happening in Queen Anne’s
