Ephelia
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Standard Name: Ephelia
Pseudonym: Ephelia
Pseudonym: A Gentlewoman
Pseudonym: A Lady of Quality
Birth Name: Mary Villiers
Styled: Lady Mary Villiers
Nickname: Butterfly
Nickname: Papillon
Married Name: Mary Herbert
Titled: Mary, Lady Herbert
Married Name: Mary Stuart
Titled: Mary Stuart, Duchess of Lennox and Richmond
Indexed Name: Mary Stuart, Duchess of Richmond
The Restoration user of the name
was a remarkably assured, forceful, and accomplished poet (as well as a playwright), although she left, outside her single printed collection (1679), only four poems extant: politicalbroadsheets and a manuscript elegy. She writes outspokenly about the pains of love, and about her ambition to outdo the achievements of women thus far in writing poetry. Her poems mourn deaths, advise and celebrate the monarch, and prosecute the war between the sexes. The possibility that these poems might have been written by a man or men has been seriously argued, but seems remote when her voice is compared on the one hand with those of male contemporaries and on the other with, for instance,
,
,
, and
. In more than a dozen years since
identified Ephelia with Mary Villiers Stuart, Duchess of Richmond, the attribution has been accepted by all standard reference sources and has had no serious printed counter-identification. Ephelia is therefore quite probably one of those few elite women who, remarkably, thought subversively in gender politics although patriarchally in national politics.Timeline
Texts
Ephelia,. A Funerall Elegie on Sr Thomas Isham Barronet.
Ephelia,. A Poem As It Was Presented To His Sacred Majesty On the Plott. 1679.
Ephelia,. A Poem to His Sacred Majesty, on the Plot. Henry Brome, 1678.
Ephelia,. Advice to His Grace. 1681.
Ephelia,. Ephelia. Editor Mulvihill, Maureen E., Ashgate, 2003.
Ephelia,. Female Poems on Several Occasions. James Courtney, 1679.
Ephelia,. Poems by Ephelia (c. 1679). Editor Mulvihill, Maureen E., Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1992.