Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anne Finch
-
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.
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
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Elstob
Begun in order to help the work of a female student, this work reiterates more strongly EE
's plea for opening the arena of scholarship to women. For examples of poetic practice she turns to...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Elstob
An early friendship that EE
regarded as important was that with Mary Randolph
of Canterbury. Randolph was in the unusual position of having a mother (who apparently shared the same name) who was very...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The young Frances Thynne grew up in a literary ambience. Her early friends included Frances Worsley, later Lady Carteret
(who apparently patronised women writers later, when her husband was Viceroy of Ireland). Family friends from...
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
...
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
Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago.
299
Friends, Associates
Anne Killigrew
Evidence about AK
's friends and contacts is sketchy, but she presumably knew well her fellow maids of honour Anne Kingsmill
and Sarah Jennings
, who later became, respectively, a distinguished poet and a powerful...
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...
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...
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 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.
