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.
SLC
's range of reference is apparently huge: to trace through these volumes the influences on her thinking would take long-term, focussed scholarly endeavour. She transcribed a couplet and elsewhere a complete poem by Mrs...
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
Friends, Associates
Lady Rachel Russell
The family had various links with Katherine Philips
, and the famous preacher Jeremy Taylor
was chaplain at Golden Grove.
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...
Publishing
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
John Dunton
's The Athenian Mercury featured Platonick Love by Elizabeth Singer (later ESR
), a poem which very deliberately echoes Friendship by Katherine Philips
as well as treating favourite Philips themes.
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, pp. 1-14.
5n20
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.
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, pp. 1-14.
4
also take pains to create an ideal of female friendship, enforced with quotations from the poetry of Katherine Philips
....
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 .
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...
