The New Atalantis

by Delarivier Manley, Ros Ballaster (Editor)

Writer and wit, proto-feminist and political intriguer, Delarivier Manley shared equal notoriety as a satirist with her friend Jonathan Swift, and The New Atalantis is her major work.

The book tells of Astrea, Goddess of Justice borne by the winds to Atalantis, where she meets her long-lost mother Virtue and is guided round the island by Lady Intelligence. Laced with autobiography, and political and erotic scandal, it was designed to expose the "secret lives" of the rich and powerful in Stuart England and, not surprisingly, was suppressed on publication in 1709.

Delarivier Manley's concerns -- with corruption in high places, the power of the propagandist, and the role of the woman writer -- remain alive an compelling today.

Genres: 18th Century, Classics, Fiction, Womens, Satire, British Literature

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1709

About the author

Delarivier "Delia" Manley, English author and playwright.

Reviews

[Candace]

I have a lot to say about this book, but very little idea of how I might rate it -- largely because the genre of this text, whatever it is, isn't something that I've ever really encountered before and I feel as though any rating I might give would have more to do with my inability to "get" the generic context than with any real sense of the text's value.

I knew going into The New Atalantis that it was a roman a clef satire. What I didn't realize was how promiscuous the satire would be -- I started making a chart of characters at the beginning of reading, but by the end it was clear that this wouldn't be at all helpful, since there are easily 100+ characters in this less-than-300-pg novel, and my grasp of the history of the Restoration and early C18 isn't good enough to actually know who all these characters are meant to stand in for without footnotes. And yet, the fact that there ARE footnotes -- some of them collated from marginalia in existing old copies of the text! -- suggests that it would have been eminently possible for contemporary readers to understand Manley's references. (I mean, she was jailed between publication of Part I and Part II for libel!)

I'm not used to dealing with prose fiction that doesn't tell a single continuous story. I don't even really like it when slightly later novels are more episodic in their structure (see: Tom Jones). And I don't think it's just the satire that makes for this episodic structure. I read large portions of Aphra Behn's Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister last semester, a similar text and an obvious precursor to Manley's, but in that text it's a lot easier to see what starts out as a strict political allegory/satire turn into a narrative in its own right. Here, some of the inset narratives start to make this kind of transformation, slowly enlarging themselves to take up more and more space in the text, but they're always curtailed. That felt strange to me, and it also meant that ti was really difficult to follow any individual plot.

But it's also the case that the plots kept repeating themselves! I've never read a text that contained so many variations on basic seduction and/or adultery plots (with a lot of bigamy and incest thrown in for good measure). It made the repeating and episodic structure of Love in Excess seem fairly minimalist by comparison! (It's also worth noting that Haywood is certainly working in a tradition in which Manley is a major player: having read Haywood first, it was easy to see which plots were being lifted almost wholesale from some of the earlier political allegories I've read by Behn and Manley.)

And then, as though the book weren't weird enough, it just sort of ends. It's not interested in doing narrative the way that most novels are interested in doing narrative (though it's certainly interested in the effect narratives have on their readers -- especially when those narratives are romances and their readers are women). It's not interested in a lot of things that I've come to take for granted as the dominant traits of 18th-c prose fiction. And it's important to me for these reasons: it reminds me how many of my assumptions aren't actually valid yet in 1709, and might not really be valid for a while after that, even if the works currently in the canon tend to confirm them.

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

The past is a different country. I felt that very acutely when reading this: a dense 18th-century social satire couched as a semi-philosophical meditation on gender and politics in an imagined parallel society. There are twice as many endnotes as there are pages, and I still felt like I was missing so much. I suppose it's partly the language; when I'm reading a medieval text, I'm fully conscious that I'm translating it, whereas here I kept on being tripped up by shifts of meaning in language that looks very close to my own.

Written by a woman, and every bit as angry as you'd expect at the near-absolute impunity of men to mistreat women, this is essentially a stream of vignettes about romantic relationships gone sour and lives wrecked by utter cads. Interesting, difficult, and more queer than I'd expected, with several discussions of "the Cabal" - a loose grouping of women who shun the company of men to a greater or lesser degree, enjoy cross-dressing (and/or find other women who do so attractive), and are frankly described as amorous towards each other. The only sensible course of action, really.

[Erica · Rating 2 out of 5]

Astrea (goddess of justice), Virtue, and Intelligence observe mankind in all its foibles in Atalantis. Chronicles the sexual exploits of leadership--Manley caused outrage, since she was satirizing real Whig leaders of her time. She was sued for libel for publishing this.

Recurring: polygamy, incest, pedophilia. Oh, 18th century literature.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction M279n 1992