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 , 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]

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]

Etexts

• Wiseman, Jane. Antiochus the Great, or, The Fatal Relapse (1701). Rpt. in Love and thunder: plays by women in the age of Queen Anne Ed. and Intro. Kendall. London: Methuen, 1988, pp. 113—153. (Free with registration at the Internet Archive)

See also

• 1701 in literature
• 1717 in poetry
• List of 18th-century British working-class writers

References

External links

• Works by or about Jane Wiseman in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

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