Catharine Trotter

16 August 1674 - 11 May 1749

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.

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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...