This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Sinéad Sturgeon. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 1674, Ireland
Died: 1732
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
Davys, Mary (1674–1732), novelist, playwright, and poet, was born in Ireland. Little is known of her background, including her maiden name: she married the Rev. Peter Davys, headmaster of the free school of St Patrick’s cathedral and writer of a well-known grammar book, Adminiculum puerile, or, An help for school boys (1694). They had two daughters who died in infancy (1695, 1699). Although Jonathan Swift described her husband as ‘a man I loved very well, but marryd very indiscreetly’, the marriage appears to have been a happy one. Peter Davys died in November 1698 and, finding herself in straitened circumstances, Mary moved to London in 1700, where she tried to support herself by writing. In 1704 she published The amours of Alcippus and Leucippe and moved to York. The following year there appeared The fugitive, a loosely autobiographical narrative, later rewritten as The merry wanderer (1725).
Davys published nothing more until 1716, when her comedy The northern heiress, or, The humours of York, first staged in York in 1715, came out. She returned to London for its production at Lincoln Inn’s Fields in April 1716. With its unusual provincial setting and effective if conventional plot, the play proved popular. Its success, she later wrote, was ‘infinitely above what I had reason to expect’ (Works, 73). With the considerable proceeds of the third night’s performance (the author’s benefit) she again tried to establish herself in London as a writer. ‘The self-rival’, a comedy, which appears in her collected works, is subtitled: ‘as it should have been acted at the Theatre-Royal, in Drury Lane’ (Works, 1). Her efforts were evidently unsuccessful, and in 1718 she opened a coffee-house in Cambridge, where she lived until her death.
In Cambridge she found a network of supporters (notably among the undergraduates who frequented her coffee-house), and produced the works by which she is now chiefly remembered. In 1724 she published by subscription The reform’d coquet, a novel which anticipated the archetypal eighteenth-century literary heroine in its portrayal of a vain, independent, flirtatious young lady and her disguised suitor. The list of subscribers included Alexander Pope, John Gay, Bishop Burnet, and numerous Cambridge undergraduates (particularly from St John’s College), and by 1760 the work had gone through seven editions. This success encouraged her to produce the Works of Mrs Davys (2 vols, 1725), which included the previously unpublished The modern poet, The self-rival, and Familiar letters betwixt a gentleman and a lady, an accomplished epistolary novel. Her next publication was a satire of fashionable London society entitled The accomplish’d rake (1727), a novel which is now, together with The reform’d coquet and Familiar letters, critically acclaimed as an influential contribution to the development of the English novel.
Towards the end of her life Mary Davys suffered from blindness and palsy, and was probably also in financial difficulties, which may account for the 1732 publication of an old manuscript, The false friend (originally written around 1700). In the spring of 1732 she sent £5 to St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin, for the purchase of an Oxford Bible. She died later that year, and was buried on 3 July at the church of the Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge.