Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anne Finch
-
Standard Name: Finch, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Kingsmill
Married Name: Anne Finch
Titled: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
Pseudonym: Ardelia
Pseudonym: Areta
Pseudonym: a Lady
Used Form: Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea
AF
is an important poet of the Restoration and early eighteenth century—highly versatile and original. She wrote in many genres: fables (a high proportion of her poems, giving scope to her humour and complexity), closet drama, elegies, political, religious, personal, and proto-feminist pieces, and a notable pindaric ode which was her single most famous publication. She sometimes wrote satire, though she was sensitive to its potential for harm. She both printed a selection of her poems and carefully preserved her oeuvre in handsome manuscript form.
The leading topics of these poems are love-relationships and women. The opening poem, A Pastoral, from the Song of Solomon, is erotic in tone. It ends: For Love's as strong as Death, and pow'rful...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Whateley Darwall
Besides Female Friendship (a vigorous defence of women's capacity for generous constancy) MWD
addressed two poems in 1766 to a Scottish friend, Mrs Hewan
. She wrote a few family pieces, including expressions of anguish...
She is also alert to female precedents. Her Verses on Mrs Rowe recall...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Elstob
Begun in order to help the work of a female student, this work reiterates more strongly EE
's plea for opening the arena of scholarship to women. For examples of poetic practice she turns to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
, must have been an important figure in enabling ESR
's writing career. Twelve years her senior, belonging to a family of a higher social rank who were in some...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Rendell
Years ago, the young and inexperienced Wexford had become certain that a swaggering thug named Eric Targo is a psychopathic (but only occasional) strangler. He has remained obsessed with Targo, but without evidence. His younger...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Brooke
FB
used her periodical The Old Maid as a forum for praise of poetry by Anne Finch
and Elizabeth Carter
.
Finch had also been celebrated in one of the essays in The World which...
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Brooke
Number 128, 12 June 1755, follows Jane Collier
's fairly recent Art of Tormenting in discussing mental cruelty in marriage; it advises husbands to use some caution, since a wife can die of a broken...
Literary responses
Sarah, Lady Piers
Thomas Colepeper
, who recorded SLP
's marriage, called her a great poetess.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She may well be one of the three Kentish women poets whom Anne Finch
celebrated (along with herself) in The Circuit of...
Literary Setting
Mary Boyle
MB
here recounts the story, set during the final days of James II
's reign, of Mary Savile, a fictional maid of honour toMary of Modena
, James's wife (whose actual maids of honour...
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
299
Publishing
Elizabeth Elstob
Its full title is An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory
, Anciently used in the English-Saxon Church. Giving an Account of the Conversion of the English from Paganism to Christianity. It...