Katherine Philips, 1631–1664. Born [Katherine Fowler], in London, 1 Jan. 1631. Educated in London. Married to James Philips, 1647. After her marriage, formed society of persons known by fanciful names; herself adopting that of Orinda. Tragedy, “Pompey” (from Corneille), produced at Smock-Alley Theatre, Dublin, Feb. 1663. Died, in London, 22 June 1664. Buried in church of St. Benet Sherehog. Works: “Pompey” (anon.), 1663 (3rd edn., same year); “Poems” (unauthorized edition), 1664. Posthumous: “Poems,” ed. by Sir C. Cotterel, 1667; “Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus,” 1705.

Personal

  From her cosen Blacket, who lived with her from her swadling cloutes to eight, and taught her to read:—She informes me viz.—when a child she was mighty apt to learne, and she assures me that she had read the Bible through before she was full four yeares old; she could have savd I know not how many places of Scripture and chapters. She was a frequent hearer of sermons; had an excellent memory and could have brought away a sermon in her memory. Very good-natured; not at all high-minded; pretty fatt; not tall; reddish faced.

  As few ladies ever lived more happy in her friends than our poetess, so those friends have done justice to her memory, and celebrated her, when dead, for those virtues they admired, when living. Mr. Dryden more than once mentions her with honour, and Mr. Cowley has written an excellent Ode upon her death.

  It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that women began to be considered competent to undertake literature as a profession. In the crowded galaxy of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets there is no female star even of the seventh magnitude. But with the Restoration, the wives and daughters, who had learned during the years of exile to act in political and diplomatic intrigue with independence and skill, took upon themselves to write independently too, and the last forty years of the century are crowded with the names of “celebrated scribbling women.” Among all these the Matchless Orinda takes the foremost place—not exactly by merit, for Aphra Behn surpassed her in genius, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, in versatility, and Catherine Trotter in professional zeal; but by the moral eminence which she attained through her elevated public career, and which she sealed by her tragical death. When the seventeenth century thought of a poetess, it naturally thought of Orinda; her figure overtopped those of her literary sisters; she was more dignified, more regal in her attitude to the public, than they were; and, in fine, she presents us with the best type we possess of the woman of letters in the seventeenth century.

General

  A woman’s Poems, the Lady Catherine Philips, are far above contempt; but that is best to me which is most holy.

  She was author of several poems, which are more to be admired for propriety and beauty of thought, than for harmony of versification, in which she was generally deficient.

  Cannot be said to have been a woman of genius; but her verses betoken an interesting and placid enthusiasm of heart, and a cultivated taste, that form a beautiful specimen of female character.

  Some of the verses of Katherine Philips,… have an easy though antithetical style, like the lighter ones of Cowley, or the verses of Sheffield and his French contemporaries.

  Mrs. Philips has always seemed to me to be one of the best of our Female Poets. Her versification, though often careless, is chaste and harmonious, and her sentiments extremely pure and excellent.

  Orinda, though not exactly “matchless,” must have been a very gifted woman—of elevated mind and character, warm attachments, and no inconsiderable poetic endowment: she was full mistress of the faculty of nervous and direct expression in verse.

  Did much to acclimatize in England the refinements, elegancies, and heroism à panache of her French neighbours. With the help of her friends she translated some of the plays of Corneille, not without adding something to the original to make it look more heroical.

  Modern criticism has entirely neglected her. I cannot find that any writer of authority has mentioned her name with interest since Keats, in 1817, when he was writing “Endymion,” came across her poems at Oxford, and in writing to Reynolds remarked that he found “a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher kind” in her poems, and quoted one piece of ten stanzas to prove it…. Nor was she, like so many of her contemporaries, an absurd, or preposterous, or unclean writer: her muse was uniformly pure and reasonable; her influence, which was very great, was exercised wholly in favour of what was beautiful and good; and if she failed, it is rather by the same accident by which so many poets of less intelligence have unexpectedly succeeded.

  Her poetry is not very interesting to the modern reader. It is affected. There is little heart-beating to be felt in it. Even to the extent of sickly prudery, she eschews the romance of love as a theme, and versifies platonically on the delights of friendship, generally friendship between one woman and another. Some of her strongest thinking is expended on political poems which have lost all savour now; and stilted use of stale classical metaphor is abundant…. Two things have to be borne in mind when we judge her. In the first place, we have to recollect the recognition she deserves as being the first English woman with sufficient imagination (and confidence in it) to adopt pliant verse as the habitual vehicle for her thinking, in defiance of the almost vested right in it which male writers had till then preserved. Her courage may be compared to that of a woman who should make herself as skilful with the rapier as a man. Over form of verse Orinda exhibits as much command as any author of her time. And, as our first poetess, she at any rate should obtain rank relatively as high as that which we accord to Cædmon, our first poet.