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
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Singer Rowe
ESR enjoyed important friendships from around the age of twenty with Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea , and Lady Hertford . Finch was twelve years older than ESR , and Hertford twenty-five years younger. They each...
Friends, Associates Alexander Pope
Pope's relationships with women, particularly women who wrote, tended to be complicated and turbulent. They have been ably studied by scholar Valerie Rumbold . Contrary to rumour, he apparently liked and respected Anne Finch ...
Friends, Associates Ephelia
If Ephelia's poems of compliment are taken to imply personal friendship, she may have been a friend of Aphra Behn , whom she praises warmly and with polite humility about her own abilities in her...
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Conway
AC never knew her father, Sir Heneage Finch , who had been Speaker of the House of Commons.
Conway, Anne et al. The Conway Letters. Editor Hutton, Sarah, Clarendon Press.
4
He was a cousin (not a close one) of the poet Anne Finch 's husband.
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Singer Rowe
They were staying in Hampstead, then near but not part of London, hoping to benefit his health. He was buried in the Rowe family vault in Bunhill Fields dissenting burial ground.
Stecher, Henry F. Elizabeth Singer Rowe, the Poetess of Frome: A Study in Eighteenth-Century English Pietism. Herbert Lang.
122
Anne Finch
Education Anna Seward
Anna's education was largely overseen by her parents. Before she was three she could recite passages from Milton 's L'Allegro and by nine the first three books of Paradise Lost.
Ashmun, Margaret. The Singing Swan. Yale University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press.
8
She was later...
Education Delarivier Manley
DM must have read widely in French fiction, which she disparaged as books of chivalry and romances.
Manley, Delarivier. “Introduction”. New Atalantis, edited by Ros Ballaster, Pickering and Chatto, p. v - xxviii.
vii
Apart from a short stay in the home of a Huguenot minister during which she perfected her...
Education Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Besides this, Henry Thynne , son of Viscount Weymouth of Longleat House (nephew by marriage of Anne Finch , and father of the future Lady Hertford ), taught ESR French and Italian. She read very...

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