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.
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...
The earliest extant poems by MWD
are carefully crafted to show her skill and her familiarity with canonical poets. Most of her exemplars are male. In Rural Happiness she echoes Anne Finch
: a female...
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...
Deverell, Mary. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Printed for the author by J. Rivington, Jun., 1781, 2 vols.
1: 79-80
She gives one epistle a kind of doggerel title: Advice to a Rev'rend Cleric, Near his grand climacteric, That...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Elstob
An early friendship that EE
regarded as important was that with Mary Randolph
of Canterbury. Randolph was in the unusual position of having a mother (who apparently shared the same name) who was very...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
ESR
enjoyed important friendships from around the age of twenty with Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea
, and Lady Hertford
. Finch was twelve years older than ESR
, and Hertford twenty-five years younger. They each...
Friends, Associates
Ephelia
If Ephelia's poems of compliment are taken to imply personal friendship, she may have been a friend of Aphra Behn
, whom she praises warmly and with polite humility about her own abilities in her...
Friends, Associates
Alexander Pope
Pope's relationships with women, particularly women who wrote, tended to be complicated and turbulent. They have been ably studied by scholar Valerie Rumbold
. Contrary to rumour, he apparently liked and respected Anne Finch
...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Thomas
ET was personally acquainted with many cultivated women, for instance Sarah Hoadly
(a painter who had trained with Mary Beale
), and her cousin Anne Osborne
(the Clemena of her poetry).
Mills, Rebecca. "Thanks for that Elegant Defense": Polemical Prose and Poetry by Women in the Early Eighteenth Century. Oxford University, 2000.
152
She was a...
Friends, Associates
Frances Seymour Countess of Hertford
The young Frances Thynne grew up in a literary ambience. Her early friends included Frances Worsley, later Lady Carteret
(who apparently patronised women writers later, when her husband was Viceroy of Ireland). Family friends from...
