Katherine Philips

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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.
Black and white photo of a head-and-shoulders painting of Katherine Philips, looking directly at the viewer. She wears a necklace above a fashionably low neckline. Her hair looks shaved in front, but reaches in a bush of curls to her shoulder. Her name is written in italics below. This portrait, at Knole House, is the only likeness of her taken from life.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Scott
MS expands Duncombe's list of Female Geniuses.
Scott, Mary, and Gae Holladay. The Female Advocate. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California.
iii
She looks farther into the past for examples than he does. Whereas Duncombe begins with Orinda (Katherine Philips ), MS turns back to the Renaissance...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Barker
The book's concluding sequence begins with JB 's painful reflections (helped by her reading) on human misery and violence. Even swine, she says, will help each other, while men will egg on fighting boys until...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sarah, Lady Piers
SLP begins here by celebrating Orinda, that is Katherine Philips . Orinda, she says, rose like the dawn or the morning star, a Champion for her Sex, but with a modesty and gentleness appropriate...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Killigrew
AK 's well-known Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another addresses an area of experience unavailable to visual description. Here she confronts a difficulty all too common for women writers in the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Williams
JW surveys the field diligently from the sixteenth century onwards. She insists in principle, however, that no artistic talent in a woman justifies the neglect of even the smallest act of domestic duty.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
This belief...
Textual Production Damaris Masham
Damaris Cudworth (later DM ) addressed to Locke a long poem wittily discussing the relationship between the sexes; she sent it to him more than a year after writing it, with one of her several...
Textual Production Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Jane Turell of Massachusetts (a generation younger than ESR , the daughter of her old admirer Benjamin Colman ) emulated Rowe so single-mindedly that Melanie Bigold feels she became a kind of American Rowe. She...
Textual Production Damaris Masham
Although very little of DM 's poetry survives, she seems to have turned to this medium as easily as to prose (like plenty of her contemporaries), for debate or introspection. Her letters to Locke make...
Textual Production Aphra Behn
This was a money-making venture at a time when the amalgamation of the two playhouses was making life hard for dramatists. Positioned on the cusp between Behn's stage career (which goes almost unmentioned here) and...
Textual Production Germaine Greer
GG has published a good deal in her scholarly field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing. Her anthology (with Susan Hastings , Jeslyn Medoff and Melinda Sansone ), Kissing the Rod, has played an...
Textual Production Catharine Trotter
It was published by 30 January 1696, as written by a Young Lady, with a dedication to Lord Dorset and a commendatory poem by Delarivier Manley which described CT as the heir to both...
Textual Production Elizabeth Walker
She also reversed this volume and began under a different title at the other end (a custom not uncommon when books and paper were scarce; Katherine Philips , for instance, did the same thing with...
Textual Production Judith Cowper Madan
The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM 's brother Ashley Cowper , dated 1747 and now British Library MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...

Timeline

1641: Pierre Corneille published his classical...

Writing climate item

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...

National or international item

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,...

Writing climate item

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...

Writing climate item

1691

Gerard Langbaine published An Account of the English Dramatick Poets.

1691: Robert Gould published another misogynist...

Writing climate item

1691

Robert Gould published another misogynist satire, A Satyrical Epistle to the Female Author of a Poem Called Sylvia's Revenge.

1697: John Evelyn included in his Numismata. A...

Women writers item

1697

John Evelyn included in his Numismata. A Discourse of Medals, Ancient and Modern a list of women famed for writing: Margaret Cavendish , Katherine Philips , Aphra Behn , Bathsua Makin , and Mary Astell .

1717: The worthy authors chosen for a miscellany...

Women writers item

1717

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,...

Building item

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 et al., Stump Cross Books, 1993.
John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, et al. 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.