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
Textual Features Elizabeth Elstob
EE 's preliminary list of names suggests considerable research work: it includes several ancient or Anglo-Saxon women as well as Mary Astell , Anne Bacon , Katherine Chidley (as the pamphlet antagonist of Thomas Edwards
Textual Features Alexander Pope
The play is remarkable among its other fun for a minor characater, Phoebe Clinket, an unhinged woman poet. She was wrongly identified in Edward Parker 's Key as Anne Finch , a mistake which has...
Textual Features Lady Margaret Sackville
The collection is dominated by nature imagery and the theme of escaping or hiding; most of the poems use traditional iambic couplets of either five or four feet. In Neglected Woods, the poet petitions...
Textual Features Jane Cave
One interesting feature is the inclusion of nine poems by other authors: the canonical Prior , Swift , and Pope , the lesser-known men John Scott , William Broome , and Nathaniel Cotton , and...
Textual Features G. B. Stern
GBS describes one of her own short stories in a manner that reflects oddly on the oblivion which enfolded earlier women writers during her career. The story concerns a beautiful, elegant young woman who feels...
Reception Ephelia
In the late nineteenth century H. B. Wheatley suggested in Samuel Halkett and John Laing 's A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain that Ephelia was somebody called Joan Phillips. This...
Reception Sappho
Among the earliest of Sappho 's translators into English was Anne Finch ; among recent translators is Mary Barnard , 1958. Stevie Smith declined to take her on. Finch chose to render not a love-poem...
Publishing Elizabeth Elstob
Its full title is An English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory , Anciently used in the English-Saxon Church. Giving an Account of the Conversion of the English from Paganism to Christianity. It...
Publishing Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Hertford later included poems of her own composition in her letters to Rowe and to Lord Winchilsea , widower of the poet Anne Finch . She exchanged verse, too, with Frederick, Prince of Wales ...
Occupation Anne Killigrew
She became, along with Anne Kingsmill (later Anne Finch) and Sarah Jennings (later Duchess of Marlborough) , a Maid of Honour to Mary of Modena (then Duchess of York).
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
299
Literary Setting Mary Boyle
MB here recounts the story, set during the final days of James II 's reign, of Mary Savile, a fictional maid of honour toMary of Modena , James's wife (whose actual maids of honour...
Literary responses Sarah, Lady Piers
Thomas Colepeper , who recorded SLP 's marriage, called her a great poetess.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She may well be one of the three Kentish women poets whom Anne Finch celebrated (along with herself) in The Circuit of...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Whateley Darwall
The earliest extant poems by MWD are carefully crafted to show her skill and her familiarity with canonical poets. Most of her exemplars are male. In Rural Happiness she echoes Anne Finch : a female...
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Lennox
The leading topics of these poems are love-relationships and women. The opening poem, A Pastoral, from the Song of Solomon, is erotic in tone. It ends: For Love's as strong as Death, and pow'rful...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Whateley Darwall
Besides Female Friendship (a vigorous defence of women's capacity for generous constancy) MWD addressed two poems in 1766 to a Scottish friend, Mrs Hewan . She wrote a few family pieces, including expressions of anguish...

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Texts

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