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
Publishing Elizabeth Carter
The Gentleman's Magazine printed EC 's On the foregoing verses. Inscrib'd to Miss L[yn]ch of Canterbury, alongside a poem by Katherine Philips , To Mrs. Mary Awbrey at parting.
Bigold, Melanie. Emails to Isobel Grundy about Trotter, Carter, and Rowe. 26 Feb. 2006.
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...
Publishing Ephelia
The book was handsomely produced, having a decorated dedication page, and a frontispiece featuring an oval portrait (or fictitious portrait) of Ephelia, with a heraldic badge above the picture and a pedestal bearing her engraved...
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.
29
, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1-14.
5n20
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...
Reception Ephelia
In the late nineteenth century H. B. Wheatley suggested in Samuel Halkett and John Laing 's A Dictionary of the Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature of Great Britain that Ephelia was somebody called Joan Phillips. This...
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 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...
Textual Features Elizabeth Elstob
EE 's preliminary list of names suggests considerable research work: it includes several ancient or Anglo-Saxon women as well as Mary Astell , Anne Bacon , Katherine Chidley (as the pamphlet antagonist of Thomas Edwards
Textual Features Elizabeth Thomas
These letters provide a vivid picture of ET's life: her cultured friends, her alertness to read and comment on new and old books (she and Gwinnett discuss Locke , Malebranche , Norris , Astell
Textual Features Jane Barker
JB writes to one male friend (my Adopted Brother) on his approaching marriage, not to congratulate but to dissuade.
Barker, Jane. Poetical Recreations. Benjamin Crayle, 1687.
11
She reflects her intimate knowledge of the work of Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Its nearly fifty poets include Margaret Cavendish , Katherine Philips , and Aphra Behn ; however, the anthology also presents more obscure writers like Diana Primrose , An Collins , Mary Carey , Anna Trapnel
Textual Features Ephelia
Among the poems of praise, To Madam Bhen [sic] (then a not uncommon rendering of Behn) adapts from Cowley 's famous praise of Philips the idea of uniting the Strong and Sweet.
Ephelia,. Female Poems on Several Occasions. James Courtney, 1679.
73
Textual Features Lucy Hutchinson
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...

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