Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Katherine Philips
-
Standard Name: Philips, Katherine
Birth Name: Katherine Fowler
Married Name: Katherine Philips
Pseudonym: Orinda
Pseudonym: The Incomparable Mrs K. P.
KP
, who wrote during the mid seventeenth century, may herself have valued her public more highly than her private ones. But she won lasting importance as a poet of passionate female friendship and as realising new possibilites in translation and drama. She was an acceptable role-model and an active inspiration and enabler for women writers of several generations, before her rediscovery in the twentieth century as an inspiration for women loving women.
They include a novel in five letters (Indamora to Lindamira), a verse-and-prose romance (The Adventurer), and poems in various pastoral and classical modes—epistles, lyrics, etc. The novel gives a voice to...
Textual Features
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Her poetry as a whole is conspicuous for its versatility. Her major early influences (Katherine Philips
and Abraham Cowley
) were succeeded by Dryden
. (She always denied any influence from Pope
.) But...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Mollineux
MM
situates her letter, like other early ones to Frances, in the context of her desire for her cousin's Temporal and Eternal Welfare, that is, her conversion to the Society of Friends
. This...
Textual Production
Damaris Masham
Damaris Cudworth (later DM
) addressed to Locke
a long poem wittily discussing the relationship between the sexes; she sent it to him more than a year after writing it, with one of her several...
Textual Production
Damaris Masham
Although very little of DM
's poetry survives, she seems to have turned to this medium as easily as to prose (like plenty of her contemporaries), for debate or introspection. Her letters to Locke make...
Textual Production
Delarivier Manley
DM
's To the Author of Agnes de Castro praised Catharine Trotter
as a successor both to Behn
and to Philips
.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon.
233
Intertextuality and Influence
Delarivier Manley
The Lost Lover is remembered for its satirised learned lady, Orinda (whose role, however, is slight). This Orinda has been interpreted (probably wrongly) as a portrait of Katherine Philips
, who had been famous under...
The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM
's brother Ashley Cowper
, dated 1747 and now British Library
MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Killigrew
AK
's well-known Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another addresses an area of experience unavailable to visual description. Here she confronts a difficulty all too common for women writers in the...
Textual Features
Lucy Hutchinson
They employ couplets and stanzas in several forms, and reflect the influence of Katherine Philips
, whose poems had just been published. Night concludes with a geometrical metaphor in Metaphysical style: His and my long...
Intertextuality and Influence
Constantia Grierson
This poem is feeling and artless. Ah Lovly harmless shade Couldst thou but see / How much thy wretched mother mourns for thee. The closing couplet strongly suggests the end of Katherine Philips
's On...
Textual Production
Germaine Greer
GG
has published a good deal in her scholarly field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing. Her anthology (with Susan Hastings
, Jeslyn Medoff
and Melinda Sansone
), Kissing the Rod, has played an...
This notice compared Fowke to her advantage with both Orinda and Astrea (Katherine Philips
and Aphra Behn
), and added: When Love's thy Theme, no low Desire appears, / Chaste are thy Sighs, seraphick...
