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 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...
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 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...
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 Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's first hymn presents the world, as God creates and adorns it and pronounces it good, as a female body.
Duquette, Natasha Aleksiuk. Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Approach to Biblical Interpretation. Pickwick Publications.
49-50
She is also alert to female precedents. Her Verses on Mrs Rowe recall...
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...
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...

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