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.
Behn's death, this elegy says, is a disaster for women's writing, for no other woman dares her Laurel wear.
qtd. in
Mendelson, Sara Heller. The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Harvester Press, 1987.
182
For a while it remained possible for women writers like Jane Barker
to claim descent...
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, 2006, pp. 1-14.
4
also take pains to create an ideal of female friendship, enforced with quotations from the poetry of Katherine Philips
....
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, 1715.
xxiv
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...
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
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
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
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
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, Mar. 2004, pp. 12-38.
35
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Lady Cowper
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
Ariadne
Ariadne says she is a young lady, who has had an Inclination . . . for Scribling from my Childhood.
qtd. in
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, 1990.
Her preface invokes both Behn
and Philips
. The play was published in 1696. In...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Elstob
Begun in order to help the work of a female student, this work reiterates more strongly EE
's plea for opening the arena of scholarship to women. For examples of poetic practice she turns to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Thomas
As a child ET was later said to have been for ever a Scribling.
Curll, Edmund et al. “The Life of Corinna. Written by Herself”. Pylades and Corinna, 1731, p. iv - lxxx.
viii
The Life of Corinna, purporting to be written by a female friend, which prefaces the first volume of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
's first hymn presents the world, as God creates and adorns it and pronounces it good, as a female body.
