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.
Engraving of a bust of Katherine Philips by Michael Vander Gucht, frontispiece to her posthumous poems. The bust, in classical style, stands in an oval alcove on a pedestal engraved "ORINDA". Philips gazes into the distance, her hair in a loose bun with a single ringlet on each side; her low, draped neckline shows her breasts.
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
Textual Features Elizabeth Singer Rowe
The Philips poem explicitly ranks friendship above marriage, since the latter relationship may be polluted by Lust, design, or some unworthy ends.
Philips, Katherine. Collected Works. Editors Thomas, Patrick et al., Stump Cross Books, 1990–1993, 3 vols.
1: 150
This use of Philips by ESR reinforces the perception of an...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Rowe's early letters to Mrs Thynne, full of gossippy entertainment and anecdotal brilliance,
Bigold, Melanie. “Elizabeth Rowe’s Fictional and Familiar Letters: Exemplarity, Enthusiasm, and the Production of Posthumous Meaning”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
29
, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1-14.
4
also take pains to create an ideal of female friendship, enforced with quotations from the poetry of Katherine Philips ....
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 Features Mary Robinson
To demonstrate, as well as arguing for, mental equality, MR learnedly surveys the course of political and literary history. She honours many women writers of the past (Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre as well...
Publishing Elizabeth Richardson
The full title is A Ladies Legacie to her Daughters, In three Books, Composed of Prayers and Meditations, fitted for, severall times, and upon severall occasions, As also severall Prayers for each day in the...
Textual Production Lady Hester Pulter
One poem celebrates an incident from 1646: a young royalist lady whose beloved had died in battle refused to live without him and shot herself dead with a pistol.
Pulter, Lady Hester. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. Editor Eardley, Alice, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies , 2014.
143-6
The first title of the...
Intertextuality and Influence Laetitia Pilkington
LP was vividly aware of the literary handicap represented by her gender. But she was choosy about claiming influence. She decried Manley , Haywood , and Mary Barber (whose poems, she says, would have been...
Reception Mary Oxlie
This work listed MO as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton , seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
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...
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...
Textual Features Martha Moulsworth
The modern edition is edited and annotated by Robert C. Evans and Barbara Wiedemann . This is apparently the earliest known autobiographical poem by a woman in English. MM writes the story of her life...
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...
Textual Features Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Her poetry as a whole is conspicuous for its versatility. Her major early influences (Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley ) were succeeded by Dryden . (She always denied any influence from Pope .) But...
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...
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...

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