External links
- Joan Cucinotta Reteshka, "Hearne, Mary (fl. 1718–1720)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 11 Nov 2006
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Mary Hearne (? fl. 1718) is the name of a novelist whose works were published by Edmund Curll.
It is possible, even likely, that the name does not accurately represent the author, as Curll frequently acquired hack writers to submit works and gave them assumed names. Therefore, it is possible that the novels written by Mary Hearne were not written by a woman or at least not by a woman named Mary Hearne. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography treats "Mary Hearne" as a proper biographical subject, but with no documentary evidence of birth, death, or marriage records.
Two novels appeared under the name of Mary Hearne. The first, The Lover's Week, appeared in 1718, dedicated to Delariviere Manley; the second, The Female Deserters, appeared in 1719. Edmund Curll published the two together as Honour, the Victory; and Love, the Prize in 1720, but they were the same novels under new titles and format. He had them serialised in Heathcote's Original London Post in 1724, but, again, without any change. The first novel features a middle-class woman seeking pleasure and wealth, and in seven days she courts and obtains a sexual and romantic liaison and source of money without marriage. The second novel has two women in degradation. One is drugged and raped (in a precursor to the scene in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa ), and the other has her suitor drugged and raped and is forced to work as servant to the first. The novels are highly sensational and competently written, but neither was a significant advance in the development of the English novel.
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Thomas Hearne or Hearn was an English diarist and prolific antiquary, particularly remembered for his published editions of many medieval English chronicles and other important historical texts.
Edmund Curll was an English bookseller and publisher. His name has become synonymous, through the attacks on him by Alexander Pope, with unscrupulous publication and publicity. Curll rose from poverty to wealth through his publishing, and he did this by approaching book printing in a mercenary and unscrupulous manner. By cashing in on scandals, publishing pornography, offering up patent medicine, using all publicity as good publicity, he managed a small empire of printing houses. He would publish high and low quality writing alike, so long as it sold. He was born in the West Country, and his late and incomplete recollections say that his father was a tradesman. He was an apprentice to a London bookseller in 1698 when he began his career.
Sarah Fielding was an English author and sister of the playwright, novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding. She wrote The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), thought to be the first novel in English aimed expressly at children. Earlier she had success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744).
Charles Gildon, was an English hack writer and translator. He produced biographies, essays, plays, poetry, fictional letters, fables, short stories, and criticism. He is remembered best as a target of Alexander Pope in Pope's Dunciad and his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and as an enemy of Jonathan Swift. Due to Pope's caricature of Gildon as well as the volume and rapidity of his writings, Gildon has become the epitome of the hired pen and literary opportunist.
Delarivier "Delia" Manley was an English author, playwright, and political pamphleteer. Manley is sometimes referred to, with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, as one of "the fair triumvirate of wit", which is a later attribution.
Venus in the Cloister or The Nun in her Smock, known in the original French as Vénus dans le cloître, ou la Religieuse en chemise (1683), is a work of erotic fiction by the Abbé du Prat, which is a pseudonym for an unknown author. Candidates for whom this might be include Jean Barrin and François de Chavigny de La Bretonnière.
Jane Barker (1652–1732) was a popular English fiction writer, poet, and a staunch Jacobite. She went into self-imposed exile when James II fled England during the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Her novels, The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, also published as Love Intrigues (1713), Exilius or The Banish'd Roman (1715), A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1723), and The Lining of the Patchwork Screen for the Ladies (1726) were written after she returned to London in 1704. Prior to and during her exile, she wrote a collection of poems justifying the value of feminine education and female single life, "Poetical Recreations" (1688), and a group of political poems, "A Collection of Poems Referring to the Times" (1701), which conveyed her anxiety about the political future of England.
White Kennett was an English bishop and antiquarian. He was educated at Westminster School and at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where, while an undergraduate, he published several translations of Latin works, including Erasmus' In Praise of Folly.
Giles Jacob was a British legal writer whose works include a well-received law dictionary that became the most popular and widespread law dictionary in the newly independent United States. Jacob was the leading legal writer of his era, according to the Yale Law Library.
Mary Pix was an English novelist and playwright. As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called "a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods".
Mary Davys (1674?–1732) was an Irish novelist and playwright.
Elizabeth Thomas was a British poet and letter writer. She was part of an important artistic group in London and John Dryden named her "Corinna". However, she suffered from lifelong financial precarity, romantic disappointment, and latterly, health problems. Her reputation was damaged by Alexander Pope and she spent three years in a debtor's prison near the end of her life.
John Durant Breval was an English poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer. He started his literary career under the alias of Joseph Gay and later gained popularity as a travel writer while using his own name after 37 editions of his Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, Relating Chiefly to their Antiquities and History were published in England between 1726 and 1738.
William Rufus Chetwood was an English or Anglo-Irish publisher and bookseller, and a prolific writer of plays and adventure novels. He also penned a valuable General History of the Stage.
Richardson Pack (1682–1728) was an English professional soldier and writer.
Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746) was an English classical scholar, known as a Neo-Latin poet.
Lucretia Bradshaw was an English actress. She was often billed as Mrs. Bradshaw.
The Adventures of Rivella (1714) is the last novel written by eighteenth century English author Delarivier Manley. The work is a semi-autobiographical account of Manley's life seen through the fictional character of Rivella. Delarivier Manley's final novel, which was later edited and published by Edmund Curll, is centred around her life before, during, and after her treacherous marriage. The events and incidents incurred by the fictional character Rivella are narrated to the reader through a conversational dialogue between two male protagonists, being Sir Lovemore and Sir D'Aumont. The narrative tells that the young chevalier D'Aumont has left France in search of sexual partnership with Rivella and instead finds the rejected lover, Sir Charles Lovemore who does not assist the Frenchman in arranging contact with Rivella, but tells her life story instead, both as it relates in public gossip and her personal writings.
Elizabeth Justice born Elizabeth Surby was a British author. Her husband's obsession with books destroyed their lives and their marriage. After he was sentenced to be transported she turned to writing about her time in Russia as the first governess and the problems that her husband had caused her. She is said to be the first woman to write of her travels to Russia.
Lady Margaret Pennyman born Margaret Angier was an English poet. Her journal records her poetry, her disastrous marriage and the loss of a fortune in an economic French bubble scheme.
