Introduction: The World as it Goes

Summary

Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) grew up in the small town of Tiverton, Devon, the daughter of Hannah (nee Richards) and Philip Parkhouse (ca. 1712–1790). An excellent scholar, her father had been “educated for Holy Orders,” but with scant prospect of securing a church living, he “became a Bookseller, as the nearest approach he could then prudently make to a life of some degree of literary enjoyment” and a member of Tiverton's corporation. As Angela Escott points out,

[Cowley] was indebted to her father not only for a knowledge of local politics, but also for the education of classics that he gave her, based on his own education at Blundell's School. […] Cowley's works reveal, both in references and use of sources, a knowledge ranging from classical literature and rhetoric to French drama and moral tales and English and French philosophical works.

Philip Parkhouse befriended Lord Harrowby, a Member of Parliament, who provided Cowley with contacts in London during the early stages of her career and subsequently helped her husband, Thomas Cowley, obtain a position with the East India Company.

The anonymous author of the preface to The Works of Mrs. Cowley (1813) describes the genesis of Cowley's first play:

a sense of mental power for dramatic writing suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her Husband at the Theatre.—So delighted with this? said she to him—why I could write as well myself ! His laugh, without notice, was answered in the course of the following morning by sketching the first Act of THE RUNAWAY, and, though she had never before written a literary line, the Play was finished with the utmost celerity.

Cowley sent her comedy to the renowned actor David Garrick, the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, who generously “tightened the text without damaging the charm and ingenuousness of the characters and situations, and helped her structure into the text moments that are clearly performable.” The Runaway premiered on February 15, 1776, and was an instant success, playing for seventeen nights. Unfortunately for Cowley, Garrick retired from the stage on June 10, 1776, and his successor as manager of Drury Lane, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, treated Cowley more like a theatrical rival than a protégée.