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.
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...
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...
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...
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, 2004.
51
ET
also translated from the sixteenth-century Latin of George Buchanan
. One poem, Ariette, was listed as set...
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
Elizabeth Elstob
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
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...
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
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...
Textual Production
Susanna Wright
Another of her longer poems, The Grove, is a politically complex, proto-environmentalist statement about the destruction of forest. This fits into a mini-tradition of women's poetry about the cutting down of trees, a topic...
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 Production
Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
The modesty in these prefatory remarks seems to relate only or chiefly to her plays, but the first poems in the collection (versions of Petrarch
) are preceded by a sonnet to Thomas James Mathias
