herself". (Morgan, 1991: xii). In the season of 1697–1698, Pix became involved in a plagiarism scandal with George Powell. Powell was a rival playwright and the manager of the Drury Lane theatrical company. Pix sent her play, The Deceiver Deceived to Powell's company, as a possible drama for them to perform. Powell rejected the play but kept the manuscript and then proceeded to write and perform a play called The Imposture Defeated, which had a plot and main character taken directly from The Deceiver Deceived. In the following public backlash, Pix accused Powell of stealing her work and Powell claimed that instead he and Pix had both drawn their plays from the same source material, an unnamed novel. In 1698, an anonymous writer, now believed to be Powell, published a letter called "To the Ingenious Mr. _." which attacked Pix and her fellow female playwright Trotter. The letter attempted to malign Pix on various issues, such as her spelling and presumption in publishing her writing. Though Pix's public reputation was not damaged and she continued writing after the plagiarism scandal, she stopped putting her name on her work and after 1699 she only included her name on one play, in spite of the fact that she is believed to have written at least seven more. Scholars still discuss the attribution of plays to Pix, notably whether or not she wrote Zelmane; or, The Corinthian Queen (1705). In May 1707 Pix published A Poem, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Lords Commissioners for the Union of the Two Kingdoms. This would be her final appearance in print. She died two years later. Wider Context Few of the female playwrights of Mary Pix's time came from a theatrical background and none came from the aristocracy: within a century, most successful actresses and female authors came from a familiar tradition of literature and theatre but Mary Pix and her contemporaries were from outside this world and had little in common with one another apart from a love for literature and a middle-class background. At the time of Mary Pix, "The ideal of the one-breadwinner family had not yet become dominant", whereas in 18th-century families it was normal for the woman to stay at home taking care of the children, house and servants, in Restoration England husband and wife worked together in familiar enterprises that sustained them both and female playwrights earned the same wage as