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
Textual Production Judith Cowper Madan
The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM 's brother Ashley Cowper , dated 1747 and now British Library MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...
Textual Production Bathsua Makin
BM wrote elegies on the deaths of two children of Lady Huntingdon . Her Latin elegy for Henry, Lord Hastings (grandson of Lady Eleanor Douglas , who died on 24 June 1649), was never printed...
Textual Production Delarivier Manley
DM 's To the Author of Agnes de Castro praised Catharine Trotter as a successor both to Behn and to Philips .
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon, 1998.
233
Intertextuality and Influence Delarivier Manley
The Lost Lover is remembered for its satirised learned lady, Orinda (whose role, however, is slight). This Orinda has been interpreted (probably wrongly) as a portrait of Katherine Philips , who had been famous under...
Textual Production Damaris Masham
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 , 2014.
143-6
The first title of the...

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