Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
-
Standard Name: Rowe, Elizabeth Singer
Birth Name: Elizabeth Singer
Married Name: Elizabeth Rowe
Pseudonym: Philomela
Pseudonym: The Pindarick Lady
Pseudonym: The Pindarical Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of Friendship in Death
ESR
wrote witty, topical, satirical poetry during the 1690s, followed later in life by letters, essays, fiction (often epistolary), and a wide range of poetic modes, often though not invariably with a moral or religious emphasis. Her reputation as a moral and devotional writer during her lifetime and for some time afterwards stood extremely high. Current critical debate is establishing the element of proto-feminist or amatory fiction (what Paula Backscheider
calls experimental, subversive, and transgressive) in her prose against the didactic-devotional element.
Backscheider, Paula R. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel. Johns Hopkins University Press.
The preface discusses what makes a religious novel. Corp suspects her work is not a novel because of its lack of a love-plot. But if she must be classed with novel-writers, she will submit with...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Deverell
The additional material keeps up the feminist interest. On Thanksgiving is headed by a quotation from Elizabeth Rowe
, and offers examples of thankfulness in female worthies of the Bible, like Deborah, Judith, Esther...
Intertextuality and Influence
Clara Reeve
Charoba is CR
's retelling of a story which she almost certainly found in Elizabeth Singer Rowe
's History of Joseph. She builds here on Rowe (rather than on Bishop Lowth
) in suggesting...
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
Sarah Savage
The diary also records SS
's delight in such biographical religious texts as the Lives of Mrs. Bury
, Mrs. Rowe
, Mrs. Walker
.
Williams, Sir John Bickerton, and Sarah Savage. Memoirs of the Life and Character of Mrs. Sarah Savage. Holdsworth and Ball.
30
Women's writing on pious topics was important to her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
's first hymn presents the world, as God creates and adorns it and pronounces it good, as a female body.
She is also alert to female precedents. Her Verses on Mrs Rowe recall...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Finch
Although AF
is often thought of as a writer of pastoral, on account of the fame of A Noctural Reverie, this mode is fairly rare in her work. She is a very social poet....
Friends, Associates
Catherine Talbot
CT
met the widowed Duchess of Somerset (better known by her former title of Lady Hertford
), who had been a patron of Elizabeth (Singer) Rowe
, and was herself an amateur writer.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
215
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...
Friends, Associates
Mary Chandler
MC
seems to have become the real friend of several women of higher rank than herself, some of whom moved from the position of her customers to that of her patrons: they included Lady Hertford
Friends, Associates
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Lady Hertford wrote that a certain distrust of her own judgement made her slow in the choice of a friend; but when that choice is made, my attachments are too strong to be easily broken...
Friends, Associates
Penelope Aubin
It is not known that PA
had writing friends or moved in literary circles.
Though the Feminist Companion and other sources call her a friend of Elizabeth Singer Rowe
, this is based on a...
Friends, Associates
Anne Finch
AF
enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken
. She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones
, to whom...
Family and Intimate relationships
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The writer Elizabeth Singer Rowe
was, says a recent commentator, like an honorary aunt to the young Frances Thynne.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press.
14
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Thomas
He had published a poem in praise of Elizabeth Singer
, and wrote to ET after her first publication.
Lipking, Joanna. “Fair Originals: Women Poets in Male Commendatory Poems”. Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Papers Presented at the . . . David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, Vol.
7
, No. 12:2, pp. 58-72.
67, 71n19
He was a Welsh barrister, son of a close friend of ET's maternal...
