Elizabeth Singer Rowe

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Standard Name: Rowe, Elizabeth Singer
Birth Name: Elizabeth Singer
Married Name: Elizabeth Rowe
Pseudonym: Philomela
Pseudonym: The Pindarick Lady
Pseudonym: The Pindarical Lady
Pseudonym: The Author of Friendship in Death
ESR wrote witty, topical, satirical poetry during the 1690s, followed later in life by letters, essays, fiction (often epistolary), and a wide range of poetic modes, often though not invariably with a moral or religious emphasis. Her reputation as a moral and devotional writer during her lifetime and for some time afterwards stood extremely high. Current critical debate is establishing the element of proto-feminist or amatory fiction (what Paula Backscheider calls experimental, subversive, and transgressive) in her prose against the didactic-devotional element.
Backscheider, Paula R. Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Development of the English Novel. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Photograph of a line engraving of Elizabeth Singer Rowe by George Vertue, 1725, shown from the waist up, wearing a simple dark dress with a low scooped neckline. Her hair is tied back with a lock appearing over one shoulder. The oval frame (contained within a rectangle) bears her name, "Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe", and is topped with emblems including a sprig of laurel and a crown; a further swag of emblematic objects below includes flowers, sheets of inscribed paper, and the trumpet of Fame.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Sarah, Lady Pennington
An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to her Absent Daughters quickly became a staple of composite volumes directed toward young women's conduct. At Edinburgh a volume of this kind, Instructions for a Young Lady, in every sphere...
Education Eliza Fletcher
Grandmother Brudend and a paternal aunt educated Eliza with poetry and stories. The letters of Elizabeth Singer Rowe were important in her reading. It was said, however, that her grandmother over-encouraged her in precocious display...
Education Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Frances became well versed in most kinds of books, as well as good at dancing.
Hughes, Helen Sard. The Gentle Hertford, Her Life and Letters. Macmillan, 1940.
7
Her books included history, theology, and romances—almost every subject except philosophy. Her father had taught Italian to the poet...
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Graeme Ferguson
Her mother, born Ann Diggs, was stepdaughter of the first colonial governor of Pennsylvania. Ann died in 1765, and like Elizabeth Singer Rowe (and Richardson 's Clarissa) she left posthumous letters for delivery after her death.
Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes, editors. American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Family and Intimate relationships Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
The writer Elizabeth Singer Rowe was, says a recent commentator, like an honorary aunt to the young Frances Thynne.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press, 2013.
14
Family and Intimate relationships Elizabeth Thomas
He had published a poem in praise of Elizabeth Singer , and wrote to ET after her first publication.
Lipking, Joanna. “Fair Originals: Women Poets in Male Commendatory Poems”. Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Papers Presented at the . . . David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, No. 12:2, pp. 58 -72.
67, 71n19
He was a Welsh barrister, son of a close friend of ET's maternal...
Friends, Associates Penelope Aubin
It is not known that PA had writing friends or moved in literary circles.
Though the Feminist Companion and other sources call her a friend of Elizabeth Singer Rowe , this is based on a...
Friends, Associates Anne Finch
AF enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken . She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones , to whom...
Friends, Associates Catherine Talbot
CT met the widowed Duchess of Somerset (better known by her former title of Lady Hertford ), who had been a patron of Elizabeth (Singer) Rowe , and was herself an amateur writer.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon, 1990.
215
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...
Friends, Associates Mary Chandler
MC seems to have become the real friend of several women of higher rank than herself, some of whom moved from the position of her customers to that of her patrons: they included Lady Hertford
Friends, Associates Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Lady Hertford wrote that a certain distrust of her own judgement made her slow in the choice of a friend; but when that choice is made, my attachments are too strong to be easily broken...
Intertextuality and Influence Harriet Corp
The preface discusses what makes a religious novel. Corp suspects her work is not a novel because of its lack of a love-plot. But if she must be classed with novel-writers, she will submit with...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Deverell
The additional material keeps up the feminist interest. On Thanksgiving is headed by a quotation from Elizabeth Rowe , and offers examples of thankfulness in female worthies of the Bible, like Deborah, Judith, Esther...
Intertextuality and Influence Clara Reeve
Charoba is CR 's retelling of a story which she almost certainly found in Elizabeth Singer Rowe 's History of Joseph. She builds here on Rowe (rather than on Bishop Lowth ) in suggesting...

Timeline

22 November 1599
Edward Fairfax licensed with the Stationers' Company his Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recouerie of Jerusalem, his translation of Gerusalemme Liberata by Torquato Tasso (1581), which was published in 1600.
25 June 1652
Eliza's Babes, or The Virgins-Offering, a book of poetry, was published now (according to George Thomason ): the work of an anonymous Lady, who onely desires to advance the glory of God, and not her own.
1670
Les Pensées de M. Pascal sur la réligion, et sur quelques autres sujets was posthumously published: it takes the form of a collection of aphorisms and very brief essays.
By May 1754
John Duncombe published The Feminiad. A Poem, which celebrates the achievements of women writers with strict attention to their support for conventional morality.
January 1781-December 1782
The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry appeared, published by James Harrison in four half-yearly numbers; it is arguable whether or not it kept the first number's promise of generous selections of work...
After 1 February 1785
M. Peddle (a gifted, little-known, Evangelical woman of Yeovil in Somerset, who later issued a conduct book under the name of Cornelia) published a biblical paraphrase in novelistic style: The Life of Jacob.
June 1793
An enterprising printer and freemason, John Wharlton Bunney , put out the first number of The Free-Mason's Magazine, or General and Complete Library.