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.
The Restoration user of the name Ephelia
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: political broadsheets...
Publishing
Ephelia
The book was handsomely produced, having a decorated dedication page, and a frontispiece featuring an oval portrait (or fictitious portrait) of Ephelia, with a heraldic badge above the picture and a pedestal bearing her engraved...
Textual Features
Ephelia
Among the poems of praise, To Madam Bhen [sic] (then a not uncommon rendering of Behn) adapts from Cowley
's famous praise of Philips
the idea of uniting the Strong and Sweet.
Ephelia,. Female Poems on Several Occasions. James Courtney.
73
Reception
Ephelia
In the late nineteenth century H. B. Wheatley
suggested in Samuel Halkett
and John Laing
's A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain that Ephelia was somebody called Joan Phillips. This...
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...
Literary responses
Martha Fowke
This notice compared Fowke to her advantage with both Orinda and Astrea (Katherine Philips
and Aphra Behn
), and added: When Love's thy Theme, no low Desire appears, / Chaste are thy Sighs, seraphick...
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...
This poem is feeling and artless. Ah Lovly harmless shade Couldst thou but see / How much thy wretched mother mourns for thee. The closing couplet strongly suggests the end of Katherine Philips
's On...
Textual Features
Lucy Hutchinson
They employ couplets and stanzas in several forms, and reflect the influence of Katherine Philips
, whose poems had just been published. Night concludes with a geometrical metaphor in Metaphysical style: His and my long...
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...
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...
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
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...
