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.
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...
Textual Production
Damaris Masham
Although very little of DM
's poetry survives, she seems to have turned to this medium as easily as to prose (like plenty of her contemporaries), for debate or introspection. Her letters to Locke make...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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.
