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
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.
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.
This belief...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jane Brereton
The book opens, like other posthumous collections, with a biographical memoir, in this case by JB 's daughter Charlotte, who reinforces the poet's own positioning of herself as Welsh, female, and modest. Envisaging potential hostility...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sarah Lady Piers
SLP begins here by celebrating Orinda, that is Katherine Philips . Orinda, she says, rose like the dawn or the morning star, a Champion for her Sex, but with a modesty and gentleness appropriate...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Scott
MS expands Duncombe's list of Female Geniuses.
Scott, Mary, and Gae Holladay. The Female Advocate. William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, 1984.
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...

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