The First Coffeehouse Writer.

Where does the name come from?

Recently I wrote a feature film and had the great pleasure of researching an Irish female writer from the Restoration era, a woman called Mary Davys.

We know little about her apart from what she wrote her self in her autobiographical novel.

As well as a novelist, Mary wrote plays.  

After leaving her hometown of Dublin, and moving to York, she failed to get work as a political writer and turned her talents to writing about the aristocracy there, leading to the play 'The Northern Heiress*'. 

Mary was successful in having the play produced and performed over three nights at the Lincoln Inn Fields Theatre in London.  This didn't guarantee her any further publication so she eventually moved to Cambridge, where she opened a coffeehouse. Here, she continued to write and teach patrons of the establishment who would pay a penny for an education and a coffee, a nice change to the pub.

So Mary was the first coffeehouse writer, and since then there have been many of us. Armed with laptops , notebooks and pens all with the same dream of being published. 

Mary's dream eventually came true, thanks to her patrons and friends, sponsoring her books. Today we would probably call this a type of crowdfunding.

Mary is responsible for how we write characters today, she had such a knack for observing the smaller characteristic traits in others.

I'll be sharing more about Mary as time goes on.

Davys, Mary (1674–1732) English novelist, dramatist, and poet 

• The Amours of Alcippus and Leucippe (1704) Fiction
• The Fugitive (1705) Fiction
• *The Northern Heiress; or, The Humors of York (1716) Drama
• The Reform'd Coquet (1724) Fiction
• The Accomplish'd Rake; or, Modern Fine Gentleman (1727) Fiction