Catharine Trotter

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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.
Black and white photograph of a line engraving of Catharine Trotter by an unknown artist, shown from the waist up. She wears a simple dark dress with scooped neckline over a white ruffled chemise. Her light hair is brushed back and hangs down behind her shoulders. The oval portrait is placed as if set into a wall, with a plaque below bearing her married name : "Catharine Cockburn". National Portrait Gallery.
"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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Elizabeth Burnet
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 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 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 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...
Friends, Associates Mary Pix
MP 's wide circle of friends included her fellow female playwrights Delarivier Manley , Catharine Trotter , and Susanna Centlivre , as well as the poet Sarah Fyge and actresses Elizabeth Barry and Susannah Verbruggen
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Burnet
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.
52
This seemed to arouse interest and...
Friends, Associates Susanna Centlivre
SC 's friends included the dramatist George Farquhar , the actress Anne Oldfield , the writers Abel Boyer , Tom Brown , Sarah Fyge , Sarah, Lady Piers , and all the other women writing...
Friends, Associates John Norris
JN conducted correspondences with a number of learned women: Mary, Lady Chudleigh (who visited him at his home), Damaris, Lady Masham (with whom his relationship ended in difference of opinion), and Elizabeth Thomas , all...
Friends, Associates John Locke
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 Sappho
Sappho 's name was an honorific for women writers for generations. George Puttenham may have been the first to use it to compliment a writing woman: in Parthienades, 1579, he said that Queen Elizabeth

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.
The volume is dated from...