their male counterparts. Morgan also points out that "till the close of the period, authorship was not generally advertised on playbills, nor always proclaimed when plays were printed", which made it easier for female authors to hide their identity so as to be more easily accepted among the most conservative audiences. As Morgan states, "plays were valued according to how they performed and not by who wrote them. When authorship ―female or otherwise― remained a matter of passing interest, female playwrights were in an open and equal market with their male colleagues". Reception and legacy Pix's plays were very successful among contemporary audiences. Each play ran for at least four to five nights and some were even brought back for additional shows years later. Her tragedies were quite popular, because she managed to mix extreme action with melting love scenes. Many critics believed that Pix's best pieces were her comedies. Pix's comedic work was lively and full of double plots, intrigue, confusion, songs, dances and humorous disguise. An Encyclopaedia of British Women Writers (1998) points out that Although some contemporary women writers, like Aphra Behn, have been rediscovered, even the most specialised scholars have little knowledge of works by writers such as Catherine Trotter, Delarivier Manley or Mary Pix, despite the fact that plays like The Beau Defeated (1700), present with a wider range of female characters than plays written by men at the time. Pix's plays generally had eight or nine female roles, while plays by male writers only had two or three. A production of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich (or The Beau Defeated) played as part of the 2018 season at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Works Pix produced one novel and seven plays. There are four other plays that were published anonymously, that are generally attributed to her. Melinda Finberg notes that "a frequent motif in all her works is sexual violence and female victimization" - be that rape or murder (in the tragedies) or forcible confinement or the threat of rape (in the comedies). Novel The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betrayed (1696) Plays Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks (1696) The Spanish Wives (1696) The Innocent Mistress (1697) The Deceiver Deceived (1697) Queen Catharine; or, The Ruines of Love (1698) The False Friend; or, the Fate of Disobedience (1699) The Beau Defeated; or, the Lucky Younger Brother (1700) The Double Distress (1701) The Czar