Delarivier Manley was the daughter of the royalist military officer and historian Sir Roger Manley (c. 1621–87) and a French-speaking noblewoman from the Spanish Netherlands, Marie-Catherine (c. 1643–75). Manley was proud of her descent and her royalist heritage; she describes her family as ‘Ancient’ in her quasi-fictional autobiography, The Adventures of Rivella, presumably referring to the fact that the Manleys of Chester had held a coat of arms (a black left hand on a white background) since at least the thirteenth century. The influence of her father's royalist politics and the transformative experiences of his years in exile undoubtedly shaped Delarivier Manley's own life and political work. In fact, it has been taken for granted by most scholars that Manley was to some extent a ‘chip off the old block’, her own work as a Tory satirist representing the logical next generation of her father's staunch royalism, as both a military officer and a historian. An early twentieth-century dissertation on Manley underscored the presumed significance of Manley's father to her own development by its subtitle ‘A Cavalier's Daughter in Grub Street’.

If we actually examine Roger Manley's extensive published works, we notice an obvious difference between them and his daughter's publications. While his histories are dry, chronological, and somewhat predictable products of an often obsequious royalist seeking patronage, his daughter's works are satirical and anecdotal, full of colourful gossip designed to tarnish the reputations of her enemies. A closer look at her father's rhetorical style, however, suggests a literary flair and a political flexibility in his letters that he might not always have been able to fully express in his official writings or his published histories. Moreover, his published histories themselves demonstrate a talent for partisan propaganda that his daughter would both inherit and develop with satiric panache.