English lady, eminent for her writings both in prose and verse, born at Ilchester, in Somersetshire, in 1674, being the daughter of worthy parents, Mr. Walter Singer and Mrs. Elizabeth Portnel. There being a great affinity between painting and poetry, this lady, who had a vein for the one, naturally had a taste for the other. She was also very fond of music, chiefly of the grave and solemn kind, as best suited the grandeur of her sentiments and the sublimity of her devotion. But poetry was her favourite employment, her distinguishing excellence; and so prevalent was her genius this way, that her prose is all poetical. In 1696, a collection of her poems was published at the desire of two friends. Her paraphrase on the thirty-eighth chapter of Job was written at the request of Bishop Ken. She had no other tutor for the French and Italian languages than Mr. Thynne, who willingly took the trouble upon himself. Her shining merit, with the charms of her person and conversation, had procured her many admirers. Amongst others, it is said, the famous Mr. Prior made his addresses to her; but Mr. Thomas Rowe was destined to be the happy man. This gentleman was honourably descended; and his superior genius, and insatiable thirst alter knowledge, were conspicuous in his earliest years. He had formed a design to compile the lives of all the illustrious persons in antiquity omitted by Plutarch; which, indeed, he partly executed, and eight lives were published after his decease. They were translated into French by the Abbé Bellenger in 1734. He spoke with ease and fluency, and had a frank and benevolent temper, an inexhaustible fund of wit, and a communicative disposition. Such was the man who, charmed with the person, character, and writings of our authoress, married her in 1710, and made it his study to repay the felicity with which she crowned his life. But too intense an application to study, beyond what the delicacy of his frame would bear, broke his health, and threw him into a consumption, which put a period to his life in May 1715, when he had but just passed the twenty-eighth year of his age. Mrs. Rowe wrote a beautiful elegy on his death; and continued to the last moments of her life to express the highest veneration and affection for his memory. As soon after his decease as her affairs would permit, she indulged her inclination for solitude by retiring to Frome, in Somersetshire, in the neighbourhood of which place lay the greatest part of her estate. In this recess it was that she composed the most celebrated of her works, Friendship in Death, and the Letters Moral and Entertaining. In 1736, she published the History of Joseph, a poem which she had written in her younger years. But she did not long survive this publication; for she died of an apoplexy, as was supposed, on the 20th of February 1736–1737. In her cabinet were found letters to several of her friends, which she had ordered to be delivered immediately after her decease. Dr. Isaac Watts, agreeably to her request, revised and published, in 1737, her devotions, under the title of Devout Exercises of the Heart in Meditation and Soliloquy, Praise and Prayer; and, in 1739, her Miscellaneous Works, in prose and verse, were published in two volumes 8vo, with an account of her life and writings prefixed. See also “From Her Elegy on Her Husband, who died Young,” “To a Friend who Persuades me to Leave the Muse”; Literary Criticism.
