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.
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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.
1: 357
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...
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...
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
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...
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...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.