Miscellaneous writer, was the daughter of a dissenting minister at Ilchester, where she was born in 1674. She was married to Thomas Rowe, a young littérateur, who lived a few years after; upon which she retired to Frome, where she resided for the remainder of her life. Her principal works are, “Friendship in Death,” “Letters, Morals and Entertaining,” and “Devout Exercises of the Heart.” Died, 1737.

Personal

  She had the happiest command over her passions, and maintained a constant calmness of temper, and sweetness of disposition, that could not be ruffled by adverse accidents. She was in the utmost degree an enemy to ill-natured satire and detraction; she was as much unacquainted with envy, as if it had been impossible for so base a passion to enter into the human mind. She had few equals in conversation; her wit was lively, and she expressed her thoughts in the most beautiful and flowing eloquence.

  This highly accomplished woman had a great share of all the personal charms that awaken love, as she had all the virtues to rivet it. Her stature was of the true standard; her hair of the most pleasing colour; and her eyes were inclined to blue, and full of fire: her complexion was fair, and often suffused by a modest blush; her voice was soft, as her manners were gentle: in short, she was all that man can form an idea of excellence and beauty.

  She made it her duty to soften the anxieties, and heighten all the satisfactions, of his life. Her capacity for superior things did not tempt her to neglect the less honourable cares which the laws of custom and decency impose on the female sex, in the connubial state; and much less was she led by a sense of her own merit, to assume anything to herself inconsistent with that duty and submission which the precepts of Christian piety so expressly enjoin.

General

  I have just finished Mrs Rowe’s “Letters from the Dead to the Living”—and moral and entertaining,—I had heard a great deal of them before I saw them, and am sorry to tell you I was much disappointed with them: they are so very enthusiastick, that the religion she preaches rather disgusts and cloys than charms and elevates—and so romantick, that every word betrays improbability, instead of disguising fiction, and displays the Author, instead of human nature.

  Her strongest bent was to poetry. So prevalent was her genius this way, that her very prose hath all the charms of verse without the fetters; the same fire and elevation, the same bright images, bold figures, and rich and flowing diction. She could hardly write a single letter but it bore the stamp of the poet.

  In the year 1736, Mrs. Rowe published her poem, called “The History of Joseph,” to which, at the urgent request of her friend Lady Hertford, she afterwards wrote a sequel, in two books, which was published early in 1737. In this poem there is a larger accumulation of historical knowledge than in all her other compositions put together. Having a natural faculty for narration, she has not only told the story fluently, in easy couplets of heroic verse, but also introduced so many apt illustrations and entertaining episodes as to make the eight first books pleasant reading. The ninth and tenth are of inferior merit, presenting merely a rhymed repetition of Scripture facts, and, consequently, a depreciating recital…. Her style, both in prose and verse, was formed on that of Addison, preserving much of the elegance of her model, with still greater ease, copiousness and luxuriance. She wrote with facility, and delighted in the act; but she was not a fastidious critic, and loathed the toil of revision. Her translations from the Italian of Tasso, Guarini, and Rolli and from the French of Racine, are respectable. She is never at a loss for words, and although her mind calls for no exact definitions or fine gradations of meaning, she strikes off the general sense of things successfully…. Her hymns want conciseness.

  Mrs. Rowe’s most popular literary compositions took an epistolary form, which she employed with much skill. In 1728 she published “Friendship in Death, in twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living” (3rd edit. 1733, 5th edit. 1738, and many other editions until 1816). Here she gave a curiously realistic expression to her faith in the soul’s immortality. “Thoughts on Death,” translated from the Moral Essays of “Messieurs de Port Royal,” was appended. A second epistolary venture, “Letters Moral and Entertaining” (pt. i. 1729, pt. ii. 1731, and pt. iii. 1733), was undertaken with the pious intention of exciting religious sentiment in the careless and dissipated. But the frankness with which Mrs. Rowe’s imaginary characters acquaint each other with their profane experiences lends her volumes some secular interest. Dr. Johnson, while commending Mrs. Rowe’s “brightness of imagery” and “purity of sentiment” in this work, describes the author as the earliest English writer to employ with success “the ornaments of romance in the decoration of religion.”