THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

talent. She served at court as a maid of honour in the cultured and sober household of Mary of Modena (the second
wife of James II) where she was acquainted with other women of talent and ambition (notably Anne Finch, Countess
of Winchilsea and Sarah Jennings, the future Duchess of Marlborough). If her ‘accomplishment’ as a mythological
painter and portraitist has since been largely ignored, her poetry has properly gained a modest reputation. In her overambitious
first poem, ‘Alexandreis’ (published in the posthumous collection of 1686), she prayed that her ‘frozen
style’ might be warmed by ‘Poetique fire’. That the prayer was answered is shown in her far more sophisticated
address to the undemonstrative Mary of Modena (‘To the Queen’), a poem which stresses the Queen’s piety and virtue
while appealing to heaven for a ‘Prowess, that with Charms of Grace and Goodness’ the poet might pay due honour to
a queen suspected and unloved by the public at large.
Killigrew’s work is essentially that of an amateur, aware of the high culture of court circles surrounding her, but
precluded from ever training her poetic voice to its proper pitch and fluency. The nagging self doubt, evident in her
defence of her work in ‘Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another’,
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is partly qualified by reference to the work of an earlier poet, one known to her admirers as ‘the Matchless Orinda’.
Katherine Philips (1631-64) seems to Killigrew to be the model of a woman writer accepted by her literary peers and
the reading public alike (‘What she did write, not only all allow’d, | But ev’ry Laurel, to her Laurel, bow’d!’). Philips,
the well-educated daughter of a London merchant, at the age of 16 married into the Welsh gentry. Despite her
husband’s service as a Member of Parliament during the Commonwealth, Philips herself seems to have maintained
certain royalist sympathies and to have won the respect of Henry Vaughan who in 1651 praised her work in Olor
Iscanus. The Poems. By the Incomparable, Mrs K.P., which first appeared in 1664 without the aggrieved author’s
permission, are marked by a celebration of female friendship. In her seclusion in Wales in the 1650s Philips drew
round her a circle of like-minded women and cultivated particularly intense platonic and poetic relationships with
Mary Aubrey (‘Rosania’) and Anne Owens (the ‘Lucasia’ to whom nearly half her verses are addressed). In April
1651 she writes in ‘L’Amitie: To Mrs M. Awbrey’ of two souls grown ‘by an incomparable mixture, One’, and with a
Donne-like sense of the exclusivity of love in perilous times, she proclaims that ‘sublim’d’ lovers rise ‘to pitty Kings,
and Conquerours despise, | Since we that sacred union have engrost, | Which they and all the sullen world have lost’.
In welcoming ‘the excellent Mrs A.O.’ into her little society Philips compares her circle to ‘A Temple of divinity’
which will attract pilgrims a thousand years hence. ‘There’s a religion in our Love’, she declares in ‘Friendship’s
Mysterys, to my dearest Lucasia’, a poem set to music by Henry Lawes in 1655, and in contrasting the ‘Apostasy’ of
Rosania to the steady friendship of Lucasia she resorts to a parallel with Elisha’s succession to Elijah as the new
friend takes up the mantle of Orinda’s love. Philips’s poems in memory of her dead infant son Hector (the ‘Epitaph’
and ‘On the death of my first and dearest childe’, both dated 1655) poignantly mourn a long-hoped-for child cut off
before his proper time. Her best ‘public’ poetry tends to mark royal occasions: she laments the execution of Charles I,
and anxiously anticipates the return of his son (‘Hasten (great prince) unto thy British Isles | Or all thy subjects will
become exiles; | To thee they flock’); she bemoans the passing of the much admired ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth of
Bohemia, in 1662 (‘this Queene’s merit fame so far hath spread | That she rules still, though dispossesst and dead’);
and she responds gracefully to the Duchess of York’s request for examples of her work with a poem opening with the
lines: ‘To you, whose dignitie strikes us with awe, | And whose far greater judgment gives us law’. In her short
lifetime Philips’s main claim to fame was her successful rhymed-couplet translation of Corneille’s tragedy La Mort de
Pompée, performed in Dublin and London in 1663. At the time of her death she left incomplete a version of the same
dramatist’s Horace (completed by John Denham and acted in 1668). Both translations were printed in the
posthumous collection Poems. By the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs Katherine Philips. The Matchless Orinda in
1667.
The acclaim accorded to Philips’s work was a rare enough phenomenon in a
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period of markedly unequal opportunities for women writers. A prosody shaped by reference to ancient poetry and a
universal insistence on the primacy of Latin and Greek in education left many women, to whom the public
educational system was largely closed, without what was regarded as the essential basis for the development of a
poet’s craft. Although there were relatively few direct heirs to the remarkable generation of highly educated sixteenthcentury
aristocratic women, changing social and religious conditions in the 1640s and 1650s do seem to have forced
open literary doors. Nevertheless, even the gifted Dorothy Osborne (1627-95) could complain in one of her celebrated
letters to her fiancé in 1653 that the poems of Margaret Cavendish (which she was anxious to read) were somehow a
literary aberrance, or, as she put it, an ‘extravagance’: ‘Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, she could never
bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too.’ The emergence of distinctive women’s