Ephelia

The Restoration user of the name Ephelia was a remarkably assured, forceful, and accomplished poet (as well as a playwright), although she left, outside her single printed collection (1679), only four poems extant: political broadsheets and a manuscript elegy. She writes outspokenly about the pains of love, and about her ambition to outdo the achievements of women thus far in writing poetry. Her poems mourn deaths, advise and celebrate the monarch, and prosecute the war between the sexes. The possibility that these poems might have been written by a man or men has been seriously argued, but seems remote when her voice is compared on the one hand with those of male contemporaries and on the other with, for instance, Katherine Philips , Aphra Behn , Philo-Philippa , and Damaris Masham . In more than a dozen years since Maureen E. Mulvihill identified Ephelia with Mary Villiers Stuart, Duchess of Richmond, the attribution has been accepted by all standard reference sources and has had no serious printed counter-identification. Ephelia is therefore quite probably one of those few elite women who, remarkably, thought subversively in gender politics although patriarchally in national politics.