While visiting a book store one day, William Wycherley and a friend overheard a fashionable young woman asking the bookseller if he had a copy of Wycherley's The Plain Dealer. Wycherley's friend immediately ushered the playwright over. "Here, madam," he declared, "is the plain dealer himself." The woman, the widowed Countess of Drogheda, exchanged pleasantries with Wycherley, declaring as she departed: "I love plain dealing best of all."

They were married in 1680.