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
Intertextuality and Influence Ariadne
Ariadne says she is a young lady, who has had an Inclination . . . for Scribling from my Childhood.
qtd. in
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, 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 Elizabeth Thomas
As a child ET was later said to have been for ever a Scribling.
Curll, Edmund et al. “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 Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB 's first hymn presents the world, as God creates and adorns it and pronounces it good, as a female body.
Duquette, Natasha Aleksiuk. Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Approach to Biblical Interpretation. Pickwick Publications, 2016.
49-50
She is also alert to female precedents. Her Verses on Mrs Rowe recall...
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 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 Constantia Grierson
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...
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 Aphra Behn
Behn's death, this elegy says, is a disaster for women's writing, for no other woman dares her Laurel wear.
qtd. in
Mendelson, Sara Heller. The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Harvester Press, 1987.
182
For a while it remained possible for women writers like Jane Barker to claim descent...
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, 2016.
92
During...
Literary responses Elizabeth Tipper
The volume is further prefaced by six poems in ET 's praise (or seven, counting the English translation of the one in Latin), all written by men. John Hallum says she excels Behn and Philips
Literary responses Sarah Lady Piers
Thomas Colepeper , who recorded SLP 's marriage, called her a great poetess.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She may well be one of the three Kentish women poets whom Anne Finch celebrated (along with herself) in The Circuit of...
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...
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: politicalbroadsheets and...

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