SUSANNAH CENTLIVRE

Summary

This clever and accomplished woman–the first female English writer who deserves the name of a dramatist–was the daughter of a gentleman named Freeman, of Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, where he possessed a good estate. A zealot in the religion of Calvin, and violent in the cause of the Parliament, his property was confiscated at the Restoration, and he took refuge in Ireland, whither, from similar causes, the father of his wife, a gentleman of fortune, named Markham, of King's Lynn, in Norfolk, was also obliged to fly. From the fact of their being such near neighbours, it is more than probable that the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Freeman took place in England, but where their daughter Susannah was born there are no means of ascertaining. The period also of her birth is extremely uncertain, some of her biographers fixing it in 1667, and others in 1680. From circumstances narrated in her after-life, it is not unlikely that she was born in 1678,–but whether in Ireland or England is matter for conjecture.

She lost her parents at a very early age: her father, according to the most received accounts, when she was only three years old, and her mother at the age of twelve; though Whincop, and the French editor of a translation of “The Wonder,” which is preceded by a brief memoir, assert that her mother died first, and that her father married again.