Anne Finch

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AF is an important poet of the Restoration and early eighteenth century—highly versatile and original. She wrote in many genres: fables (a high proportion of her poems, giving scope to her humour and complexity), closet drama, elegies, political, religious, personal, and proto-feminist pieces, and a notable pindaric ode which was her single most famous publication. She sometimes wrote satire, though she was sensitive to its potential for harm. She both printed a selection of her poems and carefully preserved her oeuvre in handsome manuscript form.
  • BirthName: Anne Kingsmill
  • Married: Finch
  • Pseudonyms: Areta; Ardelia
    She made the heaviest use of her best-known pseudonym early in her writing career, though Areta preceded it.
    ; A Lady
  • Titled: Countess of Winchilsea
    She was Mrs Finch for twenty-eight years before her husband inherited his title.—which is correctly spelled this way although the town from which it takes its name is Winchelsea.
Low resolution scan of a miniature portrait of Anne Finch by Peter Cross, painted during the 1690s. She wears a blue dress with fairly low, lace-edged neckline. Her hair is in curls above her forehead while some locks drape her shoulder on the right.

Milestones

April 1661

Anne Kingsmill (later AF ) was born at Sydmonton, Hampshire, the youngest of three children.
McGovern, Barbara. Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
8-9

From about 1682

While she was still a maid of honour to Mary of Modena , Anne Kingsmill (later AF ) began circulating her poems in manuscript: some political and religious pieces appeared in miscellanies in this decade and the next.
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. “The Progress of Another Error: Anne Finchs The SpleenLumen, Vol.
xviii
, 1999, pp. 107-17.
108

June 1701

AF 's pindaric ode The Spleen (together with some other poems by her) was published anonymously in Charles Gildon 's New Miscellany of Original Poems, on Several Occasions.
This was a revised and expanded edition of an earlier 1692 anthology edited by Gildon.
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. “The Progress of Another Error: Anne Finchs The SpleenLumen, Vol.
xviii
, 1999, pp. 107-17.
108
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. “The Progress of Another Error: Anne Finchs The SpleenLumen, Vol.
xviii
, 1999, pp. 107-17.
107, 108
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. Poems by Eminent Ladies: A Study of an Eighteenth-Century Anthology. University of Toronto, 1999.
304
McGovern, Barbara. Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
93
Gildon, Charles, editor. A New Miscellany of Original Poems, on Several Occasions. Peter Buck and George Strahan, 1701.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press, 2013.
23

13 January 1720

AF composed the latest dated poem in her Wellesley Manuscript, To His Excellency the Lord Cartret at Stockholm.
Finch, Anne. “Introduction / Editors’ Note”. The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition, edited by Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant, University of Georgia Press, 1998, p. xv - l.
xliv

5 August 1720

AF died at her house in Cleveland Row, London. The precise cause of her death is unknown.
McGovern, Barbara. Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
191

1723

AF 's The Spleen was reprinted to preface Dr William Stukeley 's medical treatise, Of the Spleen, Its Description and History, Uses and Diseases, Particularly the Vapors, with Their Remedy.
McGovern, Barbara. Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
161
Lavoie, Chantel Michelle. “The Progress of Another Error: Anne Finchs The SpleenLumen, Vol.
xviii
, 1999, pp. 107-17.
107

Biography

Birth and Family

April 1661

Anne Kingsmill (later AF ) was born at Sydmonton, Hampshire, the youngest of three children.
McGovern, Barbara. Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography. University of Georgia Press, 1992.
8-9

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