Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Catharine Trotter
-
Standard Name: Trotter, Catharine
Birth Name: Catharine Trotter
Pseudonym: Olinda
Pseudonym: A Young Lady
Nickname: Calista
Married Name: Mrs Cockburn
Pseudonym: the Author of ....
Nickname: Sappho Ecossaise
Used Form: Catharine Cockburn
Since the late twentieth century CT
has been known chiefly for her early writings, shortly before and after the year 1700, which include tragedies, poetry, a comedy, and a short fiction. Though this first phase of her career overlaps with a later one (under two different names, birth-name and married name), they are clearly distinguishable. Characteristic of the later phase, during which she published as Catharine Cockburn, are weighty works of philosophy and theology, and familiar letters. Some of her letters reflect her intellectual pursuits; her personal and domestic letters have only recently come to notice.
They include a novel in five letters (Indamora to Lindamira), a verse-and-prose romance (The Adventurer), and poems in various pastoral and classical modes—epistles, lyrics, etc. The novel gives a voice to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Russell Mitford
MRM
said her work was modelled not on the tragedy by Catharine Trotter
(later Cockburn)—in which Trotter in turn had drawn on a story by Aphra Behn
—but on an old Portuguese chronicle
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.
2: 68
Publishing
Mary Masters
This volume was printed for the Author. Its 833 subscribers (for 903 copies)
Fleeman, John David, and James McLaverty. A Bibliography of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Clarendon Press.
At the end of the volume comes a stop-press addition: six letters added at the Request of some of her Friends,
Masters, Mary. Familiar Letters and Poems on Several Occasions. D. Henry and R. Cave.
309
of which two are feminist in tone. MM
here praises the writings of...
Family and Intimate relationships
Delarivier Manley
DM
was introduced by Catharine Trotter
to John Tilly
, governor of the Fleet Prison
; he became her first long-term lover, with whom she stayed till December 1702.
Ballaster, Ros. “Early Women Writers: Lives and Times. Delarivier Manley (c. 1663-1724)”. The Female Spectator (1995-), Vol.
5
, No. 1, pp. 2-5.
3
Textual Production
Delarivier Manley
DM
's To the Author of Agnes de Castro praised Catharine Trotter
as a successor both to Behn
and to Philips
.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon.
233
Friends, Associates
Delarivier Manley
The early years of Queen Anne
's reign found DM
bitterly divided by politics from most of the women she had written and collaborated with: Centlivre
, Pix
and Trotter
, as well as Fyge.
Manley, Delarivier. “Introduction”. New Atalantis, edited by Ros Ballaster, Pickering and Chatto, p. v - xxviii.
xiii
Intertextuality and Influence
Delarivier Manley
The Lost Lover is remembered for its satirised learned lady, Orinda (whose role, however, is slight). This Orinda has been interpreted (probably wrongly) as a portrait of Katherine Philips
, who had been famous under...
Literary responses
Delarivier Manley
This was a humorous rather than a vicious attack; but of the three women targeted (Trotter
and Pix
as well as DM
), she took the heaviest fire.
Textual Production
Delarivier Manley
She contributed two poems of her own: written as Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and comic muse. The other contributors were Sarah Fyge
, Sarah, Lady Piers
, Mary Pix
, and Catharine Trotter
.
Textual Features
Delarivier Manley
This book is often seen as a sequel, and it retails the same type of scandal as the New Atalantis, but without the supernatural mediating characters. It too purports to be translated: this time...
Friends, Associates
John Locke
JL
corresponded on philosophical topics with several women interested in the subject: with Elizabeth Burnet
, the young Catharine Trotter
, and most importantly with Damaris Cudworth, later Lady Masham
. His friendship with Masham...
Literary responses
Mary Jones
Catherine Talbot
found Holt Waters and A Letter to Doctor Pitt indelicate and was surprised that Carter
liked MJ
's poetry.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press.
183
The collection was warmly praised by Ralph Griffiths
in the Monthly Review:...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Hays
She signals her intellectual seriousness by admiring accounts of Catharine Cockburn (formerly Trotter)
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge University Press.
66
and of Catharine Macaulay
; she emphasises Macaulay's concern with the moral problem of oppression and inequity, and her desire that...