Katherine Philips

Katherine Philips (b. 1632–d. 1664) is one of the most important figures in English women’s literary history. She is also a key figure within the history of 17th-century English-language poetry, irrespective of gender. Archival evidence indicates that Philips began to write while young: some of her juvenilia may have been written during her mid-teens, while the earliest items in her autograph collection of her own poems date from her late teens and early twenties. Throughout the remainder of her short life she kept writing, responding to literary fashions (such as the vogue for French neoclassical drama in the early 1660s), the downfall and restoration of the monarchy, and events within her local community and literary coteries. She formed productive acquaintances with some of the leading literary and cultural figures in contemporary London and Dublin, and was the first woman to see her work performed on the commercial stage in Britain or Ireland. Her writing shows a deep engagement with the English literary canon, and was to be an inspiration to later 17th-century and early-18th-century poets and dramatists, both male and female. After their early popularity, Philips’s writings faded from view and were little known in the later 18th and throughout the 19th centuries. (Keats, an important exception, admired her poetry and recommended it to a friend in 1817.) Her critical fortunes began to revive at the outset of the 20th century, when her poetry was re-edited and made available to a scholarly readership. Though curiously neglected in Virginia Woolf’s feminist classic, A Room of One’s Own (1929), her work has benefited greatly from the growth of scholarly interest in early modern women’s writing since the late 1980s. Her writings on female friendship have retained their popularity for feminist scholars and have also been read as key texts in the history of female literary homoeroticism. Her avid interest in politics has been discussed in relation both to literary cultures of the interregnum and Restoration and to women’s engagement with the public sphere. The survival of numerous early manuscripts of her writing a fairly detailed tracing of the production, circulation, and reception of her writing, while the issue of her involvement (or otherwise) in the publication of her 1664 Poems is still an area of lively critical disagreement. Renewed interest in the formal qualities of women’s writing, as well as attention to such issues as literary archipelagism and epistolarity, should ensure that Philips’s writing continues to speak to current critical debates and to attract high levels of scholarly attention.

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