Rowe, Elizabeth | Josephine Grieder (essay date 1972)
Josephine Grieder (essay date 1972)
SOURCE: Introduction to Friendship in Death, by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1972, pp. 5–15.
[In the following essay, Grieder provides an overview discussion of Rowe's Friendship in Death and Letters Moral and Entertaining.]
Since vice frequently receives more publicity than virtue, the reader acquainted with the scandalous lives and writings of early eighteenth-century authoresses like Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood may be surprised to learn that there were indeed respectable ladies among the female littérateurs; and that none was so highly regarded as the writer of the present volume, Mrs. Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737). She moved in what John J. Richetti calls "pious but elegant dissenting circles," which included Bishop Ken and Isaac Watts, and numbered among her friends Frances Thynne, Countess of Hertford, and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.1 When...
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