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.
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...
Author summary
Ephelia
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
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Elstob
EE
's preliminary list of names suggests considerable research work: it includes several ancient or Anglo-Saxon women as well as Mary Astell
, Anne Bacon
, Katherine Chidley
(as the pamphlet antagonist of Thomas Edwards
Literary responses
Lady Jane Cavendish
Thomas Lawrence
, in his elegy, aspires to inherit LJC
's poetic gift, by seizing her discarded mantle (as Elisha in the Bible did the prophet's mantle of Elijah). In view of recent critical debate...
Literary responses
Margaret Cavendish
These verse eulogies or testimonials came from distinguished persons and institutions to whom she had presented copies of her work. It circulated widely: the Dutch poet Constantijn Huygens
owned one of her books.
Smith, Emma. Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book. Oxford University Press.
92
During...
Publishing
Elizabeth Carter
The Gentleman's Magazine printed EC
's On the foregoing verses. Inscrib'd to Miss L[yn]ch
of Canterbury, alongside a poem by Katherine Philips
, To Mrs. Mary Awbrey at parting.
Bigold, Melanie. Emails to Isobel Grundy about Trotter, Carter, and Rowe.
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Carter
Carter's poem To Miss Lynch claims (not for the only time) Katherine Philips
as the model for her own writing. Philips's spotless verse with genuine force exprest / The brightest passion of the human breast...
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...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
EOB
writes in terms of a women's tradition: for instance, she praises Barbauld
for praising Elizabeth Rowe
. She makes confident judgements and attributions (she is sure that Lady Pakington
is the real author of...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Aphra Behn
Behn's death, this elegy says, is a disaster for women's writing, for no other woman dares her Laurel wear.
Mendelson, Sara Heller. The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Harvester Press.
182
For a while it remained possible for women writers like Jane Barker
to claim descent...
