Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Catharine Trotter
-
Standard Name: Trotter, Catharine
Birth Name: Catharine Trotter
Pseudonym: Olinda
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Nickname: Calista
Married Name: Mrs Cockburn
Pseudonym: the Author of ....
Nickname: Sappho Ecossaise
Used Form: Catharine Cockburn
Since the late twentieth century CT
has been known chiefly for her early writings, shortly before and after the year 1700, which include tragedies, poetry, a comedy, and a short fiction. Though this first phase of her career overlaps with a later one (under two different names, birth-name and married name), they are clearly distinguishable. Characteristic of the later phase, during which she published as Catharine Cockburn, are weighty works of philosophy and theology, and familiar letters. Some of her letters reflect her intellectual pursuits; her personal and domestic letters have only recently come to notice.
"Catharine Trotter" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Catharine_Cockburn.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
EB
was born into an English gentry family. John Fell
, Bishop of Oxford (remembered as a scholar and an energetic reformer and upholder of standards at Oxford University
and the University Press
), was...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth Burnet
This marriage gave EB
a family of five stepchildren (bequeathed to her care by their own mother when she was close to death). They were three boys (all of whom went on to careers ranking...
Family and Intimate relationships
Alison Cockburn
This Patrick Cockburn, by coincidence, shared his name with the husband of playwright and philosopher Catharine Trotter
, later Catharine Cockburn.
Family and Intimate relationships
Viola Tree
Throughout her life, VT
took direction from her father, the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree
, who had abandoned his job in the family corn-trading business to pursue a career on stage, and had changed...
Family and Intimate relationships
Delarivier Manley
DM
was introduced by Catharine Trotter
to John Tilly
, governor of the Fleet Prison
; he became her first long-term lover, with whom she stayed till December 1702.
Ballaster, Ros. “Early Women Writers: Lives and Times. Delarivier Manley (c. 1663-1724)”. The Female Spectator (1995-), No. 1, pp. 2 - 5.
3
Family and Intimate relationships
Sarah, Lady Piers
By the time Manley came to write New Atalantis, however, she had evidently turned against SLP
, who is now generally identified with this text's Zara, married to the less intelligent and less...
Fictionalization
Mary Pix
MP
, with Manley
and Trotter
, was lampooned on stage in The Female Wits—not virulently, but as fat, greedy, and unladylike.
The cast-list of The Female Wits, unpublished till 1704, suggests that...
In ordinary company EB
made no display of her knowledge, but she could talk to eminent churchmen as if she had equally studied the same Subject with them.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
JL
corresponded on philosophical topics with several women interested in the subject: with Elizabeth Burnet
, the young Catharine Trotter
, and most importantly with Damaris Cudworth, later Lady Masham
. His friendship with Masham...
Friends, Associates
Sarah, Lady Piers
SLP
was in correspondence with Catharine Trotter
from at least 1697 to 1709 (the year after Trotter's marriage). The relationship was warm: when Trotter, now Cockburn, was married and expecting her first child, Piers hoped...
Friends, Associates
Delarivier Manley
The early years of Queen Anne
's reign found DM
bitterly divided by politics from most of the women she had written and collaborated with: Centlivre
, Pix
and Trotter
, as well as Fyge.
Manley, Delarivier. “Introduction”. New Atalantis, edited by Ros Ballaster, Pickering and Chatto, 1991, p. v - xxviii.
xiii
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
said her work was modelled not on the tragedy by Catharine Trotter
(later Cockburn)—in which Trotter in turn had drawn on a story by Aphra Behn
—but on an old Portuguese chronicle
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870.
2: 68
Timeline
By May 1754
John Duncombe
published The Feminiad. A Poem, which celebrates the achievements of women writers with strict attention to their support for conventional morality.
By July 1755
Thomas Amory
published Memoirs of the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (an odd, ragbag work which is not, however, history or biography, but is generally classed as a novel).
January 1756
The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, a monthly, began publishing under the editorship of Tobias Smollett
, ostensibly by a Society of Gentlemen.
1785
Dialogues Concerning the Ladies, a celebration of famous women, was anonymously published; it borrows from Ballard
's Memoirs of Eminent Ladies.
By September 1887
William Walker
published at AberdeenThe Bards of Bon-Accord, 1375-1860, a history of poetry in Aberdeenshire, which had already appeared serially in the Herald and Weekly Free Press.
