Jane Wiseman (1682–1717)

Jane Wiseman seems to have come from a modest working-class background and probably was employed as a servant in Oxford. Then she became an actor, making her first recorded appearance onstage in 1700 in the role of Roxolana in Mustapha. She went on to write the play Antiochus the Great, or The Fatal Relapse, successfully produced in 1701 at the New Theatre, Lincoln's Inn Field, London. She used the profits to buy a tavern for herself and her husband, a vintner named Holt, in Westminster. Not much else is known about her. She is thought to have been the "Mrs. Holt" whose collection of verse, A Fairy Tale Inscrib'd to the Honourable Mrs. W—, with other Poems, was published in 1717.