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 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
Textual Production Mary Delany
Mary Pendarves (later MD ) expressed anxiety that she might be thought (by a man) to set up for a poet, and that is a character I detest, unless I was able to maintain it...
Textual Production Elizabeth Boyd
She dedicated it to her patron Lady Hertford . The British Library copy is 12604 ccc. 7. Harvard University holds the only known copy of an undated set of subscription proposals, which is headed Any...
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, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 357
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Brereton
In the first of this group of poems, Melissa declares her own inferiority to Fidelia (with a brief survey of other poets including Pope , Buckingham , Prior , Dryden and Finch ).
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Brereton
The book opens, like other posthumous collections, with a biographical memoir, in this case by JB 's daughter Charlotte, who reinforces the poet's own positioning of herself as Welsh, female, and modest. Envisaging potential hostility...

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