Because Roger Manley spent his career as a military officer, enough of his official correspondence exists for us to obtain a fairly clear sense of where he lived and how he passed his time during the last three decades of his life. Unfortunately, there is no such official paper trail for his daughter Delarivier. A handful of her letters to Robert Harley survive, as does the order for her arrest for libel in November 1709, following the publication of the second volume of The New Atalantis; there is also evidence in London's municipal archives about a transfer of debt in the autumn of 1705 and her imprisonment in the Fleet later that year. However, there is much about Manley's life, including basic details such as the year and place of her birth, about which there is no tangible record. Manley requested in her will that most of her personal papers, with the exception of the drafts of several plays, be destroyed after her death. Most of the information we have about her must be sifted out from her fictional autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella, and from the presumably somewhat fictionalized anecdotes about her own life and experiences included in her epistolary and satirical works. However, as has already been suggested, Delarivier Manley, like her father, was adept at persuading others to view her as she wished them to; moreover, the way she presented herself often had a political motive behind it.

Birth and Early Childhood

We turn with some caution, therefore, to The Adventures of Rivella, in order to tease out a narrative of her life and early years. Through the voice of her admiring male narrator, Lovemore, she informs the reader that she was born ‘in Hampshire, in one of those Islands, which formerly belong'd to France, where her Father was Governour’. Presumably this passage means simply that Manley was born on the Island of Jersey some time between 1667 and 1672, during the period when her father was lieutenant governor of the royal forts and castles on that island. Although the isle of Jersey was never part of Hampshire, the Channel islands were considered part of the diocese of Winchester, Hampshire (or Sarum), during this era.