Anne Finch

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Standard Name: Finch, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Kingsmill
Married Name: Anne Finch
Titled: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
Pseudonym: Ardelia
Pseudonym: Areta
Pseudonym: a Lady
Used Form: Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea
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.
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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho , the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Brereton
In the first of this group of poems, Melissa declares her own inferiority to Fidelia (with a brief survey of other poets including Pope , Buckingham , Prior , Dryden and Finch ).
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Brereton
The book opens, like other posthumous collections, with a biographical memoir, in this case by JB 's daughter Charlotte, who reinforces the poet's own positioning of herself as Welsh, female, and modest. Envisaging potential hostility...
Textual Production Rosemary Sutcliff
Dundee began his distinguished military career as a scourge of the Covenanters . It was cut short at the battle of Killiecrankie where he was championing James II . His early death made him indelibly...
Textual Production Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
The modesty in these prefatory remarks seems to relate only or chiefly to her plays, but the first poems in the collection (versions of Petrarch ) are preceded by a sonnet to Thomas James Mathias
Textual Production Josephine Tey
JT , as Gordon Daviot, published Claverhouse, a life of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee , who was first the scourge of the Covenanters , and then a Jacobite leader whose heroic...
Textual Production Mary Delany
Mary Pendarves (later MD ) expressed anxiety that she might be thought (by a man) to set up for a poet, and that is a character I detest, unless I was able to maintain it...
Textual Production Mary Russell Mitford
MRM took a keen interest in the reputations of women writers. She planned in 1821 to write an essay on Miss Austen 's novels, which are by no means valued as they deserve
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers.
1: 357
Textual Production Susanna Wright
Another of her longer poems, The Grove, is a politically complex, proto-environmentalist statement about the destruction of forest. This fits into a mini-tradition of women's poetry about the cutting down of trees, a topic...
Textual Production Mary Pix
MP 's comedy The Different Widows; or, Intrigue all-a-Mode, was anonymously published, dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury .
The widowed Countess of Salisbury was also celebrated by Anne Finch . A manuscript note...
Textual Production Elizabeth Boyd
She dedicated it to her patron Lady Hertford . The British Library copy is 12604 ccc. 7. Harvard University holds the only known copy of an undated set of subscription proposals, which is headed Any...
Textual Production Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
It was in this year that Lord Winchilsea told Lady Hertford how pleased his late wife (the poet Anne Finch ) would have been with her achievement. At about the same period Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Textual Features Delarivier Manley
The New Atalantis is crammed with offensive personal attacks on individuals (women as well as men); most though not all of them pertain to the misuse of political or sexual power. Particularly notorious is the...
Textual Features Elizabeth Tollet
The volume opens with translations from classical authors, and includes two psalms translated into Latin.
Londry, Michael, and Elizabeth Tollet. The Poems of Elizabeth Tollet. Oxford University.
51
ET also translated from the sixteenth-century Latin of George Buchanan . One poem, Ariette, was listed as set...
Textual Features Judith Sargent Murray
After conjuring up the morning in typically ornate diction—soft and harmonizing is the balmy breath of the vernal zephyr—and hailing Order as constitutional regent of the Natural World, she goes on to a...

Timeline

1656: Abraham Cowley published Poems; this volume,...

Writing climate item

1656

Abraham Cowley published Poems; this volume, which included his Pindaric Odes and Miscellanies, confirmed his stature as the leading poet of the day.

1673: Molière's comedy Les Femmes savantes, first...

Writing climate item

1673

Molière 's comedyLes Femmes savantes, first staged the previous year, was published.

27 May 1682: Mary of Modena, wife of the future James...

National or international item

27 May 1682

Mary of Modena , wife of the future James II , arrived in England.

April 1684: Mr and Mrs Priest's school at Gorges House,...

Building item

April 1684

Mr and Mrs Priest's school at Gorges House, Chelsea, put on a private revival of the court masque Venus and Adonis, by John Blow (to a libretto perhaps by the future Anne Finch ).

27 July 1689: John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee,...

National or international item

27 July 1689

John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee , led a force of Scottish Highlanders loyal to James II against William ite English soldiers in the pass of Killiecrankie.

27 November 1703: The Great Storm hit much of Southern England,...

Building item

27 November 1703

The Great Storm hit much of Southern England, leaving many houses demolish'd and people kill'd.

2 May 1709: Poetical Miscellanies. The Sixth Part was...

Writing climate item

2 May 1709

Poetical Miscellanies. The Sixth Part was published, including Pope 's Pastorals and poems by Anne Finch (which are placed between work by Pope and Swift ).

December 1713: Richard Steele published Poetical Miscellanies;...

Writing climate item

December 1713

Richard Steele published Poetical Miscellanies; it included poems by Pope , Anne Finch , and himself (including praise of the unnamed and only recently identified young Elizabeth Tollet ).

1717: The worthy authors chosen for a miscellany...

Women writers item

1717

The worthy authors chosen for a miscellany entitled The Agreeable Variety by its female editor included Behn , Philips , Chudleigh , and Finch .

Christmas 1819: William Wordsworth presented Lady Mary Lowther...

Women writers item

Christmas 1819

William Wordsworth presented Lady Mary Lowther with a little manuscript volume of poems: those by women were mostly copied from the pages of Poems by Eminent Ladies.

Texts

Finch, Anne. Free-Thinkers. A Poem in Dialogue. Printed by the booksellers of London and Westminster, 1711.
Finch, Anne. “Introduction”. The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, edited by Myra Reynolds, University of Chicago Press, 1903, p. xvii - cxxxiv.
Murry, John Middleton, and Anne Finch. “Introduction”. Poems by Anne, Countess of Winchilsea 1661-1720, Jonathan Cape, 1928, pp. 3-20.
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.
Finch, Anne. Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions. Printed for John Barber and sold by Benjamin Tooke, William Taylor, and James Round, 1713.
Wordsworth, William, and Anne Finch. Poems and Extracts Chosen by William Wordsworth for an Album presented to Lady Mary Lowther, Christmas 1819. Editor Littledale, Harold, H. Frowde, 1905.
Finch, Anne. The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition. Editors McGovern, Barbara and Charles H. Hinnant, University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Finch, Anne. The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea. Editor Reynolds, Myra, University of Chicago Press, 1903.