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.
They employ couplets and stanzas in several forms, and reflect the influence of Katherine Philips
, whose poems had just been published. Night concludes with a geometrical metaphor in Metaphysical style: His and my long...
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...
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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 .
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.
233
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Aphra Behn
This was a money-making venture at a time when the amalgamation of the two playhouses was making life hard for dramatists. Positioned on the cusp between Behn's stage career (which goes almost unmentioned here) and...
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Germaine Greer
GG
has published a good deal in her scholarly field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing. Her anthology (with Susan Hastings
, Jeslyn Medoff
and Melinda Sansone
), Kissing the Rod, has played an...
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Catharine Trotter
It was published by 30 January 1696, as written by a Young Lady, with a dedication to Lord Dorset
and a commendatory poem by Delarivier Manley
which described CT
as the heir to both...
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Elizabeth Walker
She also reversed this volume and began under a different title at the other end (a custom not uncommon when books and paper were scarce; Katherine Philips
, for instance, did the same thing with...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Jane Williams
JW
surveys the field diligently from the sixteenth century onwards. She insists in principle, however, that no artistic talent in a woman justifies the neglect of even the smallest act of domestic duty.
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.
Scott, Mary, and Gae Holladay. The Female Advocate. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California.
iii
She looks farther into the past for examples than he does. Whereas Duncombe begins with Orinda (Katherine Philips
), MS
turns back to the Renaissance...