Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Katherine Philips
-
Standard Name: Philips, Katherine
Birth Name: Katherine Fowler
Married Name: Katherine Philips
Pseudonym: Orinda
Pseudonym: The Incomparable Mrs K. P.
KP
, who wrote during the mid seventeenth century, may herself have valued her public more highly than her private ones. But she won lasting importance as a poet of passionate female friendship and as realising new possibilites in translation and drama. She was an acceptable role-model and an active inspiration and enabler for women writers of several generations, before her rediscovery in the twentieth century as an inspiration for women loving women.
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Nothing is known of SLC
's education, but it must have been both religious and relatively advanced, to account for her wide and intellectually intense reading as an adult in history, philosophy, and theology.
Kugler, Anne. Errant Plagiary: The Life and Writing of Lady Sarah Cowper, 1644-1720. Stanford University Press, 2002.
Wharton, Anne. “Introduction”. The Surviving Works of Anne Wharton, edited by Germaine Greer and Selina Hastings, Stump Cross Books, 1997, pp. 1-124.
21-2
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Thomas
ET was personally acquainted with many cultivated women, for instance Sarah Hoadly
(a painter who had trained with Mary Beale
), and her cousin Anne Osborne
(the Clemena of her poetry).
Mills, Rebecca. "Thanks for that Elegant Defense": Polemical Prose and Poetry by Women in the Early Eighteenth Century. Oxford University, 2000.
152
She was a...
Friends, Associates
Dorothy Osborne
DO
's sister-in-law Martha, Lady Giffard
, a historical writer and an early widow, lived permanently with the family. Sir William Temple employed the young Jonathan Swift
from 1689. DO
was a friend and correspondent...
Friends, Associates
Lady Rachel Russell
The family had various links with Katherine Philips
, and the famous preacher Jeremy Taylor
was chaplain at Golden Grove.
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Sappho
's name was an honorific for women writers for generations. George Puttenham
may have been the first to use it to compliment a writing woman: in Parthienades, 1579, he said that Queen Elizabeth
Intertextuality and Influence
Ariadne
Ariadne says she is a young lady, who has had an Inclination . . . for Scribling from my Childhood.
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.
Her preface invokes both Behn
and Philips
. The play was published in 1696. In...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Elstob
Begun in order to help the work of a female student, this work reiterates more strongly EE
's plea for opening the arena of scholarship to women. For examples of poetic practice she turns to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
's first hymn presents the world, as God creates and adorns it and pronounces it good, as a female body.
She is also alert to female precedents. Her Verses on Mrs Rowe recall...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Mollineux
MM
situates her letter, like other early ones to Frances, in the context of her desire for her cousin's Temporal and Eternal Welfare, that is, her conversion to the Society of Friends
. This...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
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
Elizabeth Thomas
As a child ET was later said to have been for ever a Scribling.
Curll, Edmund, Elizabeth Thomas, and Richard Gwinnett. “The Life of Corinna. Written by Herself”. Pylades and Corinna, 1731, p. iv - lxxx.
viii
The Life of Corinna, purporting to be written by a female friend, which prefaces the first volume of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jane Barker
JB
makes a pretence that the main story, the on-again off-again love of Bosvil and Galesia, is related by Galesia, in the garden at St Germain in about 1688, to someone called Lucasia (a name...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Finch
This volume (once owned by Edmund Gosse
) reproduces with very little revision nearly all the poems in the octavo, as well as adding fifty-five more. It also includes AF
's important prose preface, her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Tollet
ET
's untitled poem beginning Proud Monuments of Art! renown'd of old probably echoes a poem in Katherine Philips
's Pompey which begins with the same first two words.
Londry, Michael. “On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, c. 1660-1830, with Special Reference to Women Poets”. The Library, Vol.
5
, No. 1, pp. 12-38.
35
Timeline
1641
Pierre Corneille
published his classical tragedyHorace, which had been first performed the previous year.
3 September 1651
Royalist hopes of a military victory were finally crushed by defeat at the battle of Worcester; the future Charles II
became a fugitive.
1656
Abraham Cowley
published Poems; this volume, which included his Pindaric Odes and Miscellanies, confirmed his stature as the leading poet of the day.
1691
Gerard Langbaine
published An Account of the English Dramatick Poets.
1691
Robert Gould
published another misogynist satire, A Satyrical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem Called Sylvia's Revenge.
The worthy authors chosen for a miscellany entitled The Agreeable Variety by its female editor included Behn
, Philips
, Chudleigh
, and Finch
.
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.
Texts
Philips, Katherine. Collected Works. Editors Thomas, Patrick, Germaine Greer, and R. Little, Stump Cross Books, 1993.
John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, Thomas Otway, and Katherine Philips. Familiar Letters. Samuel Briscoe, 1697.
Corneille, Pierre. Horace. Translators Philips, Katherine and Sir John Denham, Henry Herringman, 1669.
Philips, Katherine. “Introduction and Textual Notes”. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda, Volume I: The Poems, edited by Patrick Thomas, Stump Cross Books, 1990, pp. 1-68.
Philips, Katherine. “Introduction and Textual Notes”. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda, Volume II: The Letters, edited by Patrick Thomas, Stump Cross Books, 1992, p. xi - xviii.
Philips, Katherine. “Introduction and Textual Notes”. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, Volume III: The Translations, edited by Germaine Greer and R. Little, Stump Cross Books, 1993, p. ix - xxi.
Philips, Katherine. Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus. Bernard Lintott, 1705.
Philips, Katherine. Poems. Richard Marriott, 1664.
Philips, Katherine. Poems. Henry Herringman, 1667.
Corneille, Pierre. Pompey. Translator Philips, Katherine, Samuel Dancer, 1663.
Philips, Katherine, and James Greenwood. “The Virgin”. The Virgin Muse, T. Varnam and F. Osborne, 1717.
Philips, Katherine, and William Cartwright. “To the most Ingenious and Virtuous Gentleman Mr. William Cartwright, my much valued Friend”. Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems, First, Humphrey Moseley, 1651.