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.
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
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
Elizabeth Tollet
ET
's untitled poem beginning Proud Monuments of Art! renown'd of old probably echoes a poem in Katherine Philips
's Pompey which begins with the same first two words.
Londry, Michael. “On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, c. 1660-1830, with Special Reference to Women Poets”. The Library, Vol.
5
, No. 1, pp. 12-38.
35
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Catharine Trotter
It was published the same year, dedicated to Lord Halifax
. Like Fatal Friendship, it carried commendatory verses by Lady Piers
which situate Trotter as an heir to both Behn
and Philips
.
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
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Wharton
Elizabeth Elstob
cited AW
's poetic achievement along with that of the far better-known Katherine Philips
and Anne Finch
.
Elstob, Elizabeth. The Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue. J. Bowyer and C. King.
xxiv
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...
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
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...
Literary responses
Sarah, Lady Piers
Thomas Colepeper
, who recorded SLP
's marriage, called her a great poetess.
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
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...
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...
