Secret Histories

Abstract

Secret history is a polemical form of history writing that flourished during the political ferment of the period 1640–1714. Like many other ‘new’ forms of writing of this period, it is a hybrid of a number of different literary traditions, adapted to new political and cultural circumstances. This chapter traces the evolving contours of secret history through texts that are familiar to students of literature and history (for instance, Andrew Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677); Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683–5); and Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis (1709)) as well as relatively obscure, but nonetheless sophisticated and self-conscious, examples of the form. It reveals secret history to be a form in which political responsiveness and literary innovation are intimately connected, and in which the complexities of the literary and political relationship between England and France are especially apparent.