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.
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...
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...
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...
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
...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Ruth Rendell
Years ago, the young and inexperienced Wexford had become certain that a swaggering thug named Eric Targo is a psychopathic (but only occasional) strangler. He has remained obsessed with Targo, but without evidence. His younger...
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...
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...
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
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
, must have been an important figure in enabling ESR
's writing career. Twelve years her senior, belonging to a family of a higher social rank who were in some...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
