Jane Wiseman

For other people with the same name, see Jane Wiseman (disambiguation).

Jane Holt (née Wiseman; March 1673 – after 1717)[1] was a British poet and playwright, notable for being the first self-educated labouring-class woman to have a play professionally produced in London.[2]

Wiseman was possibly born in Holborn. She seems to have been from a modest labouring-class background and self-taught and she worked as a servant, but very little else is known about her. Her one play, Antiochus the Great, or, The Fatal Relapse, was successfully produced at the New Theatre, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1701, and revived as late as 1721.[3] It was one of forty or so plays by women produced in London between 1695 and 1723, and is notable for its emphasis on female friendship.[4] She was part of a literary group with Susannah Centlivre, with whom she was friends, as well as George Farquhar, Abel Boyer, Ned Ward, and Tom Brown.[5]

Black and white engraving of a woman's head and shoulders in profile
Tragedienne Elizabeth Barry played Leodice in Wiseman's Antiochus the Great

She is thought to have been the "Mrs Holt" whose collection of occasional and friendship poems, A Fairy Tale Inscrib'd, to the Honourable Mrs. W—, with other Poems, was published in 1717.[6]

Wiseman took the proceeds from her success with Antiochus the Great and bought a tavern in Westminster for herself and her husband.[6]

  1. ^ Jane Wiseman Archived 9 November 2018 at the Wayback Machine at the Orlando Project, Cambridge University Press
  2. ^ Kendall. "Jane Wiseman". Love and thunder: plays by women in the age of Queen Anne London: Methuen, 1988, pp. 114—117. (Internet Archive)
  3. ^ Pearson, Jacqueline. The prostituted muse. Palgrave Macmillan, 1988, p. 235. (Internet Archive)
  4. ^ Kendall. Intro. Love and thunder: plays by women in the age of Queen Anne London: Methuen, 1988, pp. 9—12. (Internet Archive)
  5. ^ Anon. Letters of Wit, Politicks and Morality. (London, 1701, p. 21.), cited by Kendall. "Jane Wiseman". Love and thunder: plays by women in the age of Queen Anne London: Methuen, 1988, p. 114. (Internet Archive)
  6. ^ a b Christmas, William J. “Holt, Jane (fl. c.1682–1717).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Accessed 23 July 2022.