[In the following essay, Andreadis traces Philips's conscious use of male Platonic friendships as a model for her homoerotic poetry about friendships between women.]

Katherine Philips, known as “The Matchless Orinda,” was the first English female poet to achieve a considerable reputation in her own time. She was extravagantly praised, indeed lionized, by her male contemporaries: Abraham Cowley, the earl of Roscommon (Wentworth Dillon), Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden, and much later, even John Keats referred to her as the female standard of excellence toward which all other women ought to aspire.¹ Andrew Marvell may have been influenced by some of her poetic language and Henry Lawes set a number of her poems to music.² Laudatory references continue into the eighteenth century, particularly by women writers who, responding to male commentary on the proper female poetic persona, saw in Philips a model of success to be emulated.³ In her own time, despite her bourgeois background, her great charm and cultivated feminine modesty gained her admittance, after the Restoration, to the best literary and court circles. The nobility, some of whom were literati, welcomed her presence and felt graced by her genius.

The acclaim of her contemporaries has by now, however, worn very thin: she is seen as having “wielded persistently her all too fluent pen,” as having had friendships with women “florid in their intensity,” or as having “wanted to take on, by cajolery rather than by assault, an artistic role generally reserved for men.”⁴ In works of literary history, she is listed generally as a minor Caroline poet who kept alive the traditions of the cavalier poets through the years of the Interregnum. For the most part, she has been studied as a member of male literary circles, for the sake of her distinguished literary connections or for her literary influence.⁵ In works dealing with women writers, she is most often described as a minor example of préciosité or, conversely, as an example of “the growing influence of neoclassicism,”⁶ and, thus, she is given a perfunctory place in anthologies.⁷ At best, she is regarded as the poetic model for a later, female “school of Orinda” or as an influence on certain male poets. At worst, she is accused of versifying gossip.⁸ Even such a recent, and sympathetic, critic as Lillian Faderman does little to alter the view of Philips's 1931 biographer, Philip Webster Souers, that “her greatest claim to attention is that she was among the few who kept alive in the teeth of Puritan scorn and persecution the old court tradition, and handed it over ready for use to the returning wits of the Restoration.”⁹

Her production was small since her life was short. It includes a single volume of poems written for her friends, published in an unauthorized edition in the year of her death, and then reedited, expanded, and reprinted posthumously by her friend and literary executor, Sir Charles Cotterell; a translation of Pierre Corneille's Pompey and a partial translation of Horace completed by Robert Denham; a volume of her letters to Sir Charles, dubbed Poliarchus in précieuse fashion, edited and published posthumously by him in 1705; and four letters to “Berenice,” an anonymous noblewoman, published with the Familiar Letters of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, in 1697. In all, five editions of her work appeared after the unauthorized 1664 folio edition of her Poems, the final one being the 1710 octavo of her Works.¹⁰ Her reputation during the seventeenth century was based on a privately circulated group of poems addressed to her intimate women friends and chronicling in some detail her emotional relations with them. Her other poems were mostly occasional or moral-philosophical exercises in what we now consider the traditional, and rather undistinguished, mode of the seventeenth century; elegies, encomia, political poems, verse essays on friendship, poems of personal retirement and contemplation, and a journey poem are characteristic. Philips's real contribution to English letters, however, though acknowledged by her contemporaries and by the women writers who succeeded her, has been either overlooked or trivialized by students of English literature since the late eighteenth century. It is remarkable that, as a woman, she could have achieved the considerable reputation she enjoyed among her contemporaries. That her contribution was acknowledged by them is without question. We must then ask what that contribution really was and why it was so highly esteemed.

An examination of the materials of Philips's life and work reveals a woman whose emotional focus was primarily on other women and whose passionate involvement with them guided much of her life and inspired her most esteemed poems. Philips's original and unusual use of literary conventions accounts for the acclaim she was accorded by her contemporaries, and her unique manipulation of the conventions of male poetic discourse, of the argumentative texture of John Donne, of the language of the cavaliers, and of the tradition of platonic love became the means by which she expressed in an acceptable form her homoerotic impulses. Philips's contribution was to appropriate the cavalier conventions of platonic heterosexual love, with their originally platonic and male homoerotic feeling, and to use those conventions and that discourse to describe her relations with women. While homoerotic male poetic discourse in the form of male friendship poetry was by no means unusual during the Renaissance and early seventeenth century, Philips's is the earliest printed example of a woman's poetic expression in English of intense same-sex love between women.

The poems that brought her acclaim, and that still are considered her best work, established a “society of friendship” that used, superficially, the rhetorical conventions of the cavalier poets and of French préciosité. In her attempt to create an ideal “society” of friends, in her use of pastoral nicknames for her friends, in her reading of Italian and French romances, and in her attraction to the idea of platonic love, Philips embraced current literary and courtly fashions.¹¹ To see her work merely as an example of préciosité does not, however, do justice to the breadth of interests and influences her work reveals. Moreover, though she uses its superficial trappings, her poetic language does not fit the précieux prescription for periphrasis, tortured hyperbole, or excessive imagery. Instead, a disinterested reading of Philips's works suggests a more judicious view than has been offered by literary critics: like others among her contemporaries, most notably Abraham Cowley, one of her admirers, she moved in the course of her literary career—as did a number of male poets—from the private, contemplative, metaphysical mode of her poetry during the Interregnum to a more public neoclassical style during the Restoration.¹² Her earlier work is composed for the most part of the platonic love lyrics to her female friends that initially won her praise; but later, during and after the Restoration, she turned to longer poems on public themes and to the translations of Corneille. Certainly Philips was ambitious and certainly her work was embedded in the traditions, culture, and fashions of her time. Yet it would be more accurate to say that the forms she used coincided with and appropriated literary fashion rather than that she wrote as she did only because she courted poetic success. The evidence of her life indicates that the forms she used also fulfilled important personal needs.

Philips used the conventions of her time to express in her own poetry a desexualized—though passionate and eroticized—version of platonic love in the love of same-sex friendship. In Philips's poetry friendship between women is infused with the passionate intensity and rhetoric of heterosexual love as it was understood by seventeenth-century male poets. The major influence on her friendship poems may not be the cavaliers or préciosité but John Donne and the metaphysical conceit, for the intensity of her friendship feelings is expressed through echoes of Donne's early seduction poems.¹³

An attentive reading of her poems addressed to Rosania, her pseudo-classical name for her school friend Mary Aubrey, and to Lucasia, Anne Owen, who replaced Rosania in Philips's affections after Rosania's marriage, reveals the intensity of Philips's emotions and her unique use of convention as a vehicle to express her intimate feelings. To my Lucasia, in defence of declared friendship, one of Philips's best-known and most admired poems, is typical of her work: she appropriates both the sentiments of metaphysical platonism and the form of male poetic discourse to shape her passion. Stanzas 8 through 12 are especially clear in illustrating her rhetorical strategies:

Although we know we love, yet while our soule
          Is thus imprison'd by the flesh we wear,
There's no way left that bondage to controule,
          But to convey transactions through the Eare.
Nay, though we read our passions in the Ey,
          It will obleige and please to tell them too:
Such joys as these by motion multiply,
          Were't but to find that our souls told us true.
Believe not then, that being now secure
          Of either's heart, we have no more to doe:
The Sphaeres themselves by motion do endure,
          And they move on by Circulation too.
And as a River, when it once has pay'd
          The tribute which it to the Ocean ow's,
Stops not, but turns, and having curl'd and play'd
          On its own waves, the shore it overflows:
So the Soul's motion does not end in bliss,
          But on her self she scatters and dilates,
And on the Object doubles, till by this
          She finds new Joys, which that reflux creates.(14)

Evident here is the manner in which Philips channels a passionate emotional intensity into acceptable metaphysical images and argument. The platonic union of souls, the eyes as vehicles of the spirit, and the analogy between the movement of human hearts and the circulation of the spheres were stocks in trade of the male discourse of metaphysical passion for women. Here, a female poetic voice uses these conventional images to address her intensely beloved female friend. In her invocation to her beloved to speak their love, she adds to these images the particularly female and subliminally erotic analogy of a river's flow, which captures the rhythms of female sexual passion.

Philips's use of Donne, rather than the lesser cavalier poets, for her model is apparent not only in the echoes of his particular images but more precisely in the force of her argumentative stance, in the relentless development of thought through the manipulation of conceit. To My excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship, again echoes Donne:

I did not live untill this time
          Crown'd my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
          I am not Thine, but Thee.
This Carkasse breath'd, and walk'd, and slept,
          So that the world believ'd
There was a soule the motions kept;
          But they were all deceiv'd.
For as a watch by art is wound
          To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
          A Soule till she found thine;
Which now inspires, cures and supply's,
          And guides my darken'd brest:
For thou art all that I can prize,
          My Joy, my Life, my rest.
Nor Bridegroomes nor crown'd conqu'rour's mirth
          To mine compar'd can be:
They have but pieces of this Earth,
          I've all the world in thee.
Then let our flame still light and shine,
          (And no bold feare controule)
As innocent as our design,
          Immortall as our Soule.

[No. 36, 176]

Except that these poems are addressed to a woman, they could have been written by a man to his (female) lover. Clearly, the discourse used by Philips is both male and heterosexual. And, in this poem, it reaches beyond the merely conventional image of “two friends ‘mingling souls'” in the extravagant intensity of the conceit of the watch.¹⁵

“To My excellent Lucasia” adumbrates Donne's imagery as well as the intellectual form of his metaphysical poetic. The union of lover and beloved, the soullessness of the “Carkasse” before discovery of the beloved, the negative comparison of the condition of the beloved to more worldly joys (“Nor Bridegroomes nor crown'd conqu'rour's mirth”) to enforce the sacredness of the relation, and the insistence on the “innocent … design” of their love, are also integral to Donne's love poetry.

“Friendship in Emblem, or the Seale, to my dearest Lucasia” perhaps most obviously draws on Donne in its use of the compass image from A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. Here again, the crucial element that distinguishes her source as Donne rather than the cavaliers is the sustained force of her intellectual argument in developing the conceit. Stanzas 6 through 13 illustrate this clearly:

The compasses that stand above
Express this great immortall Love;
For friends, like them, can prove this true,
They are, and yet they are not, two.
And in their posture is express'd
Friendship's exalted interest:
Each follows where the other Leanes,
And what each does, the other meanes.
And as when one foot does stand fast,
And t'other circles seeks to cast,
The steddy part does regulate
And make the wanderer's motion streight:
So friends are onely Two in this,
T'reclaime each other when they misse:
For whosoe're will grossely fall,
Can never be a friend at all.
And as that usefull instrument
For even lines was ever meant;
So friendship from good = angells springs,
To teach the world heroique things.
As these are found out in design
To rule and measure every line;
So friendship governs actions best,
Prescribing Law to all the rest.
And as in nature nothing's set
So Just as lines and numbers mett;
So compasses for these being made,
Doe friendship's harmony perswade.
And like to them, so friends may own
Extension, not division:
Their points, like bodys, separate;
But head, like soules, knows no such fate.

[No. 29, 132-35]

The conceit of the compass, an emblem of constancy, as used by Donne to explore the meaning of his approaching absence from his wife is here present as subtext in Philips's poem.¹⁶ Her use of the same conceit—and it is her most obvious echo of Donne—to describe her passionate friendship for Lucasia is played against the silent text of Donne's poem, which reverberates through it and underlines its platonism as well as its eroticism.

These are only a few examples of Philips's appropriation of Donne and the metaphysical mode of argument. A reading of all of her poems to her female intimates yields others. It is the intense, passionate quality of her feeling, the emotional tension inherent in the argument of the conceit, that distinguishes these poems from her other poetic efforts. She appropriated a male heterosexual poetic discourse, with its platonism, its implicit eroticism, and its impassioned argument via conceits, rather than the less intense, more distant tone of the male friendship poetry of her contemporaries because this discourse suited the deeply intimate nature of the emotions she sought to chart and for which she sought a vehicle.

Though Philips's expression may bear some resemblance to the platonism of some earlier male friendship literature, such as Michel de Montaigne's essay, “On Friendship,” she probably was not acquainted with earlier renaissance models.¹⁷ Most of her reading was limited to her near contemporaries, whose friendship poetry employs, instead of a renaissance platonic ideal, the Horatian ideal of civilized life and the Aristotelian notion of friendship as the bond of the state to defend against the “cavalier winter.”¹⁸ These contemporaries are more concerned to place friendship in the context of retirement to nature as an escape from the turmoil of the times than to explore the ecstasies and trials of intimacy through the language of platonism. Theirs is a generalized approach to the subject that is in contrast to Philips's impassioned use of direct address and metaphysical conceit.

That these poems were not merely clever exercises in courtly convention by a woman seeking reputation and patronage (as were, perhaps, some of her Restoration poems addressed to royalty) is confirmed by the circumstances of Philips's life and letters. Born Katherine Fowler, the daughter of a prosperous London cloth merchant, in 1648 she married James Philips, whom she was to call Antenor in keeping with her penchant for devising pseudo-classical names for her intimates. She was sixteen; he was fifty-four. Clearly, in this marriage, probably arranged by her mother, she loved and respected her husband as she was socially and morally bound to do. Yet, clearly also, there was much distance between them in addition to their respective ages. He lived on the remote west coast of Wales at Cardigan Priory, while she was attached to the intellectual and social amenities of London and took, or created, every opportunity to return to literary and court circles. Her politics were also different from his: she remained a royalist like her friends and courtly admirers, while he and her family were parliamentarians. This publicly recognized political difference at least once threatened his political career.¹⁹

Antenor's absence never evoked the same metaphysical anguish in Philips as did that of Rosania or Lucasia; she wrote of him most often in terms of her “duty.” A telling contrast is that between the frequently unrestrained emotion in her many poems lamenting the absence of a female friend²⁰ and the relative coolness of her single poem to Antenor upon his absence and of her descriptions of her “duty” to Sir Charles. On her immanent departure from Ireland and Lucasia, she wrote: “I have now no longer any pretence of Business to detain me, and a Storm must not keep me from Antenor and my Duty, lest I raise a greater within. But oh! that there were no Tempests but those of the Sea for me to suffer in parting with my dear Lucasia!” (Letter 19, 631). This passage succinctly points to a contrast that is apparent throughout Philips's writing; it juxtaposes, on the one hand, her feelings of obligation to her husband and, on the other, her passion for Lucasia. As to the rest of her immediate family, her son is mentioned only twice in her writings, both times in poems, one of them a particularly dull one about his death at the age of forty-one days; her daughter, who survived her, is never mentioned at all, either in her poems or in her letters.²¹

Having endured, in 1652, Mary Aubrey's (Rosania's) defection from their friendship into marriage, Philips wrote at least one poem on her “apostasy,” and quickly replaced her with Anne Owen (Lucasia).²² In 1662, Anne Owen, too, married, and Orinda despised Owen's new husband, Marcus Trevor, which added to her grief. Nevertheless, she accompanied the newlyweds to Dublin and stayed on for a year, ostensibly to conduct her husband's business (he was now in some financial and political distress owing to his parliamentarianism) and to finish Pompey and see it played at the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley, Dublin. She had also begun to develop aristocratic connections: the earl of Orrery offered her encouragement, she frequented the duke of Ormonde's salon, and she was becoming friendly with the countess of Cork.

She described her feelings to Sir Charles, whose suit to Anne Owen she had unsuccessfully encouraged, presumably in an attempt to keep Anne within her immediate social circle and in close geographical proximity: “I am much surpriz'd that she, who is so well-bred, and her Conversation every way so agreeable, can be so happy with him as she seems to be: for indeed she is nothing but Joy, and never so well pleas'd as in his Company; which makes me conclude, that she is either extremely chang'd, or has more of the dissembling Cunning of our Sex than I thought she had” (Letter 13, 603).²³ She wrote repeatedly to Sir Charles of her grief and disappointment, not unmixed with bitterness, at the loss of her bond with Anne Owen. Her grief in these letters is as acute as the passion in the earlier poems is intense. From Dublin on July 30, 1662, she wrote:

I now see by Experience that one may love too much, and offend more by a too fond Sincerity, than by a careless Indifferency, provided it be but handsomly varnish'd over with civil Respect. I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-proof. … We may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship. … Sometimes I think it is because we are in truth more ill-natur'd than we really take our selves to be; and more forgetful of past Offices of Friendship, when they are superseded by others of a fresher Date, which carrying with them the Plausibility of more Duty and Religion in the Knot that ties them, we persuade our selves will excuse us if the Heat and Zeal of our former Friendships decline and wear off into Lukewarmness and Indifferency: whereas there is indeed a certain secret Meanness in our Souls, which mercenarily inclines our Affections to those with whom we must necessarily be oblig'd for the most part to converse, and from whom we expect the chiefest outward Conveniencies. And thus we are apt to flatter our selves that we are constant and unchang'd in our Friendship, tho' we insensibly fall into Coldness and Estrangement.

[Letter 13, 601-2]

Her letters to Sir Charles during this period are full of disappointed idealism, of highmindedness scorned. The scale of values Philips holds dear in these letters, and in her poetry, places the noble feelings of disinterested friendship far above the frequently compromised and banal motives of marriage and duty. Nevertheless, her notion of disinterested friendship is driven by intensely passionate commitment to the individual woman in question, so that when, in the usual course of things, her friend marries, she responds as a lover scorned. The feelings she expressed in her letters to Sir Charles concerning the defection of Anne Owen reverberate from the poems she had written ten years earlier on the apostasy of Mary Aubrey:

Lovely apostate! what was my offence?
Or am I punish'd for obedience?
For our twin-spirits did so long agree,
You must undoe your self to ruine me.
… Glorious Friendship, whence your honour springs,
Ly's gasping in the croud of common things;
For from my passion your last rigours grew,
And you kill me, because I worshipp'd you.

[Injuria amici, no. 38, 182-83]

Thus Philips reveals a covert, innate rebelliousness; she protests with chagrin Mary Aubrey's and Anne Owen's replacement of such romantic sentiments with ones more suitable to the exigencies of social and economic life.

Her last known passionate attachment seems to have been to “Berenice,” whom she knew at least since 1658, when she wrote begging her to come to Cardigan and console her for Lucasia's absence.²⁴ Philips evidently continued her correspondence with “Berenice” after returning from Ireland to her home at Cardigan Priory in Wales because the last letter is dated from there a month before her death in London. The tone of the four letters to “Berenice” is a combination of nearly fawning supplication to a social superior and breathless passion, the two inextricably fused:

All that I can tell you of my Desires to see your Ladiship will be repetition, for I had with as much earnestness as I was capable of, Begg'd it then, and yet have so much of the Beggar in me, that I must redouble that importunity now, and tell you, That I Gasp for you with an impatience that is not to be imagin'd by any Soul wound up to a less concern in Friendship then yours is, and therefore I cannot hope to make others sensible of my vast desires to enjoy you, but I can safely appeal to your own Illustrious Heart, where I am sure of a Court of Equity to relieve me in all the Complaints and Suplications my Friendship can put up.

[Letter 51, 773]²⁵

It is impossible to disentangle the elements of Orinda's passion for “Berenice,” complicated as their relationship was by social inequality and as our understanding of it is by an absence of any information external to the four letters. However, Philips's tone in these letters seems desperate beyond any conventional courtliness; she yearns to fill the void left by Lucasia's absence and, later, rejection.

After her success with Pompey on the Dublin stage, Philips found it difficult to remain immured at the Priory and finally was able to solicit an invitation from her friends, and her husband's permission, to return to London, where she died of smallpox at the age of thirty-one. A major change had taken place in Philips's life when the loss of her friendship with Lucasia was coincidentally accompanied by the foundering fortunes of her husband, which she attempted to remedy through her well-placed friends. That she had not succeeded in doing so when she died suggests that the double blow she had suffered left her depressed (as the anxiety in her last letters to Sir Charles shows), weakened, and vulnerable to disease.

After the defection of Lucasia, she wrote no more of the poetry that had won her such high praise; instead, she poured her energies into using her court connections to gain patronage for herself and, probably unsuccessfully, preferment for Antenor. She wrote numerous poems to royalty, self-consciously addressing public themes, and increasingly fewer intimate poems to particular friends. Also, she vied with the male wits for recognition of her theatrical translations, which are still considered the best English versions of Corneille.²⁶ Philips's immersion in Corneille and the adoption of a more neoclassical style may have been politically expedient in the early 1660s, but at this time in Philips's life, Corneille's subordination of personal passion to duty and patriotism in the long speeches that she translated also must have appealed to her own need to control her disordered emotions.²⁷

Her royalist sympathies throughout the Interregnum no doubt now enabled her to advance the interests of her parliamentarian husband as well as her own literary ambitions. Souers comments on the notable change in her poems and in her stance toward literary circles: “The Cult of Friendship may be said to have died with the marriage of its inspirer. All that remained was the empty shell, which, in this case, means the names, so that when, later, poems addressed to new friends appear, it must be kept in mind that the old fire is gone.”²⁸ Souers's judgment is borne out by the poems Philips addressed to the Boyle sisters, daughters of the countess of Cork, a patron during Philips's stay in Ireland. Though she attempts to continue, or perhaps to revivify, the traditions of her cult of friendship by bestowing pastoral nicknames, Philips reveals in her later poems the conflict and ambivalence with which more intimate approaches to her social superiors are fraught. She confronts this problem of friendship with aristocratic women directly in “To Celimena” (1662-64), addressed to Lady Elizabeth Boyle; the eight-line poem concludes: “Wouldst thou depose thy Saint into thy Friend? / Equality in friendship is requir'd, / Which here were criminal to be desir'd” (no. 107, 472). Her earlier passionate avowals of friendship have become reverential.²⁹

The poems that made Orinda famous depended for their creation on Philips's personal affections. When the person to whom those affections were directed removed herself permanently from the sphere of Philips's life, the well of her unique creativity dried up, though she continued to refine her craft. Orinda may have sought other muses, such as “Berenice,” but if indeed she did, the quest seems to have been fruitless, or even half-hearted, given the severity of her loss and the need to turn her attention to the matter of her husband's (and her own) livelihood and economic well-being. That Philips was aware of the change in her interests and, indeed, undertook it deliberately, is poignantly obvious in her comments to Sir Charles from Dublin on May 2, 1663: “I have us'd all the Arts that Diversion could afford me, to divide and cure a Passion that has met with so ill a Return, and am not a little oblig'd to my Lady Cork's Family for assisting me in that Intention: But oh! I begin already to dread what will become of me, when I return home, and am restor'd to the sight of those Places, where I have been so often blest with the Enjoyment of a Conversation in which I took so much Delight, and is now for ever ravish'd from me” (Letter 29, 672). She needed, however, to keep up appearances and, as Souers notes, did so in a perfunctory manner—conscious that impassioned friendship was incompatible with social advancement—by continuing to write poems to women that retained the form, if not the passion, of her earlier work.

An examination of Philips's life in conjunction with the poems that initially won her praise thus reveals that her friendship poems to Rosania and Lucasia were an unvarnished expression of her love channeled into the already acceptable, even fashionable, mode of male heterosexual poetic discourse. Once we understand that the feelings in these poems are “real” and that they are confirmed by her letters to Sir Charles and “Berenice,” it becomes clear that they are also homoerotic and have a place beside the long classical tradition of the literature of male love.

Male friendship literature written in English before the 1580s, according to Stephen Latt, relies heavily on classical precedent and “tends to be unoriginal or, at best, a rehearsal of old commonplaces—without originality, without personal application.”³⁰ In the 1580s, however, male friendship literature exhibited a movement “towards a more emotional expression of friendship,”³¹ which appropriated the civilities of Horatian and Aristotelian ideals and which continued into the seventeenth century with the poems of Thomas Carew, James Howell, Richard Lovelace, and Henry Vaughan (who was also part of Orinda's circle of male literary friends). In describing the friendship literature of the years 1620-64, Latt notes a “gradual movement away from the public level of experience. With the pressures of the times, writers turned increasingly inward. The turmoil of dissension, the chaos of rebellion, and the catastrophe of regicide freed loyal monarchists to desert the public scene.”³² Philips's poetry paralleled rather than emulated this male tradition, and it is distinguished from the poetry of her contemporaries in its personal intensity and in the metaphysical platonism she used to address female friendship.

Philips's awareness of the connection between her own feelings and the male tradition of friendship is manifest to some extent in her attempts to assure herself of the acceptability of her attachments by writing to Jeremy Taylor concerning the religious nature and limits of friendship. His answer to her, in “A Discourse of the Nature, Offices, and Measures, of Friendship, with Rules of Conducting It, in a Letter to the Most Ingenious and Excellent Mrs. Katharine Philips” (1657), cannot have been very satisfactory; his view is, as one might expect, rigorously androcentric in its treatment of women as friends only in relation to men: “A man is the best friend in trouble, but a woman may be equal to him in the days of joy: a woman can as well increase our comforts, but cannot so well lessen our sorrows.”³³ Reaffirming traditional views, Taylor denied women's capacity for true friendship with men and ignored friendship between women. Perhaps more satisfying to Philips was the opening of Francis Finch's treatise Friendship (1653-54), dedicated to Anne Owen, “D. Noble Lucasia-Orinda,” in which Finch publicly acknowledged and graciously complimented the relationship so important to Philips.³⁴

She turned her fluent control of contemporary seventeenth-century male poetic idiom to her own particular uses, thus placing herself uniquely in a tradition whose only previous female exponent was the classical poet Sappho. That this daring manipulation of convention caused admiration for her work is quite apparent in the commendatory poems that introduce her poetry and in other contemporary comments that repeatedly praise her likeness to Sappho. Philips seems to have been the first English poet to have evoked that classical comparison. Until it later became a more conventional literary compliment, toward the end of the century, this comparison seems to have been somewhat problematic because of Sappho's presumed sexual transgressions. Sappho's work was recognized as the highest literary achievement in lyric poetry by a woman; although her subject matter was regarded as questionable by contemporary writers, it was echoed by Orinda. Sir Charles wrote in the preface to the 1667 edition of Philips's poems which he edited: “We might well have call'd her the English Sappho, she of all the female Poets of former Ages, being for her Verses and her Vertues both, the most highly to be valued. … And for her Vertues, they as much surpass'd those of Sappho as the Theological do the Moral, (wherein yet Orinda was not her inferior).”³⁵ One Philo-Philippa, the anonymous author of one of the commendatory poems for this volume, writes:

Ingage us unto Books, Sappho comes forth,
Though not of Hesiod's age, of Hesiod's worth,
If Souls no Sexes have, as 'tis confest,
'Tis not the he or she makes Poems best:
Nor can men call these Verses Feminine,
Be the sense vigorous and Masculine.(36)

Abraham Cowley, the author of Davideis, which contains at least one homoerotic passage, describes Philips's poetic art:

'Tis solid, and 'tis manly all,
Or rather, 'tis Angelical:
          For, as in Angels, we
          Do in thy verses see
Both improv'd Sexes eminently meet;
They are than Man more strong, and
          more than Woman sweet.

Moreover, in the following he is at pains to describe Philips as a more virtuous Sappho, to distinguish her exemplary modesty and purity from the manners of her model:

They talk of Sappho, but, alas! the shame
Ill Manners soil the lustre of her fame.
Orinda's inward Vertue is so bright,
That, like a Lantern's fair enclosed light,
It through the Paper shines where she doth write.
Honour and Friendship, and the gen'rous scorn
          Of things for which we were not born,
(Things that can only by a fond disease,
Like that of Girles our vicious stomacks please)
Are the instructive subjects of her Pen.(37)

Praise of Philips as the standard of female excellence and poetic skill continued through the seventeenth century and into the mid-eighteenth century. Her name is linked with those of Aphra Behn (“Astrea”) and Sappho in many of the commendatory poems and epistles written by women that preface plays written by women for the London stage of Queen Anne; she became a model to be emulated and replaced. In 1696, Mary Pix addressed Delariviere Manley on “her Tragedy call'd The Royal Mischief”: “Like Sappho Charming, like Afra Eloquent, / Like Chast Orinda sweetly Innocent.”³⁸

Nancy Cotton and Jane Spencer point out that Orinda and Astrea became the two ideals in a female tradition to which later women writers aspired.³⁹ Yet Sappho continued to provide the second figure in a separate dyad and continued to be linked with Orinda when the issue was female poetic genius, so that the comparison of Orinda to Sappho became increasingly conventional.⁴⁰ The persistence of this association is apparent in these lines from John Duncombe's 1754 The Feminiad: A Poem, which echo very clearly the sentiments expressed by Cowley almost a century earlier:

Nor need we now from our own Britain rove
In search of genius, to the Lesbian grove,
Tho' Sappho there her tuneful lyre has strung,
And amorous griefs in sweetest accents sung,
Since her, in Charles's days, amidst a train
Of shameless bards, licentious and profane,
The chaste Orinda rose; with purer light,
Like modest Cynthia, beaming thro' the night:
Fair Friendship's lustre, undisguis'd by art,
Glows in her lines, and animates her heart;
Friendship, that jewel, which, tho' all confess
Its peerless value, yet how few possess!(41)

Though, after this, Orinda's reputation seems to have declined, its particular characteristics were reclaimed intact when, in 1905, George Saintsbury wittily introduced her poetry as “her Sapphic-Platonics.”⁴²

These comparisons with Sappho are important because they refer to the great classical female model of lyric poetry, but they are also important because they explicitly indicate a similarity of subject matter. Even though Cowley and Duncombe acknowledged this similarity of subject matter, they were also, paradoxically, eager to dispel the erotic content implicit in the comparison by emphasizing Orinda's purity. What we would now call the bisexuality of Sappho, to which Cowley and Duncombe allude, was also part of Sappho's legend for Orinda's contemporaries. Sappho's reputation for erotic involvement with women, as well as with men, was conveyed to the seventeenth century primarily by certain passages in Ovid's Heroides (“No more the Lesbian Dames my passion move, / Once the dear Objects of my guilty Love”), by Horace's references to mascula Sappho and to Sappho's complaints about the young women of Lesbos, and by the ode preserved by Longinus from Sappho to a female lover.⁴³ Donne himself wrote the explicitly sexual poem Sapho to Philaenis:

And betweene us all sweetnesse may be had;
          All, all that Nature yields, or Art can adde.
My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,
          But so, as thine from one another doe;
And, oh, no more; the likenesse being such,
          Why should they not alike in all parts touch?
Hand to strange hand, lippe to lippe none denies;
          Why should they brest to brest, or thighs to thighs?(44)

Bayle's Dictionary (1710), though somewhat later, also is unequivocal in its view of Sappho's erotic activities (“her Amorous Passion extended even to the Persons of her own Sex” and “Sappho always passed for a Famous Tribas,” or tribade), citing evidence that had been available since the Renaissance.⁴⁵ We can infer, then, that the writers of contemporary encomia to Orinda understood the nature of allusions to Sappho but were eager to dispel any suggestions of unnatural sexuality. They wished to pay her the high compliment of comparing her to the great classical lyricist not only for her poetical voice, but also for the uniqueness of her subject matter, at the same time that they wished to reconfirm her platonic purity. The encomium was appropriate and perhaps inevitable, if somewhat uncomfortable. Eventually, as it became more conventional, the comparison to Sappho was often used to suggest only literary accomplishment until Saintsbury recalled its original significance. Since Saintsbury, readers of Philips's work have simply neglected or trivialized her contribution to the history of poetic ideas: the recovery of the homoeroticism of platonic ideals in their classical lesbian context.

It was Philips's use of the conventions of male poetic discourse, particularly of the metaphysicals and the cavaliers, and her echoing of the literary tradition of male friendship, that sanctioned her unconventional subject and, in fact, made it a novelty in her time. Because her discourse was familiar her subject was acceptable. Without those conventions, and without Philips's modest and feminine demeanor in court circles, and her exemplary personal virtuousness, it seems unlikely that her poetry would have been praised as it was. Her literary example initiated a tradition of published female friendship poetry whose parameters have yet to be defined. The men who were her contemporaries accepted her ideals of passionate friendship between women and were persuaded to regard them as ennobling because they could recognize in their rhetorical strategies a parallel or analogue to their own ideals of heterosexual platonism and male friendship. That her poetic model was Donne, with his unquestioned heterosexual eroticism, only emphasizes the erotic nature of her passions.

The aspect of homosexuality that is pertinent to this study of Philips is a curious one. The poetic use of classical pastoral and friendship conventions in renaissance and seventeenth-century literature tells us next to nothing about the actual circumstances of people's lives. But in the case of Katherine Philips, external sources in the form of her letters and her highly unusual use of convention indicate that the feelings expressed in her poems were more than conventional or courtly gestures. This fact calls for an inquiry into the history of homosexuality in England.

We still know very little about the private erotic relations between women in seventeenth-century England. Lesbianism was not named as a reason for prosecuting women and few private documents have come to light that describe lesbian activities during this period.⁴⁶ The appearance, not too long after Philips's death, of literary documents by English women that portray explicitly lesbian activity—such as the duchess of Newcastle's play, The Convent of Pleasure (1668), Anne Killigrew's poem of erotic flagellation, “Upon a Little Lady Under the Discipline of an Excellent Person” (1686), Aphra Behn's poem “To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love to Me, Imagined More than Woman” (1688), and Delariviere Manley's “new Cabal” in her roman à clef The New Atlantis (1709)—surely is suggestive. However, these documents stand in an at best ambiguous relation to actual intimate behaviors, although they do indicate clearly that lesbian activities, as the twentieth century understands them, had been publicly articulated by women by the late 1660s and were regarded as scandalous infractions of the laws of nature.⁴⁷ In English cultural mythology, tribades were classed with pederasts, and probably papists, but we do not today have more reliable documentation of their activities, as we do about those of male homosexuals.

Alan Bray has described the change that took place in male homosexual life in England from 1650 to 1700. According to his research into court records and other documents, it was at this time that “molly” houses came into being as a symptom of the increasing isolation of practicing homosexuals from traditional institutions. This was the beginning of what we now call a homosexual subculture that evidently did not include women, though the appearance of explicitly lesbian literary subject matter might suggest the existence of an analogous female subculture. Of course, as Bray suggests, at the point of emergence of a subculture, the dominant culture officially recognizes that such individuals do indeed exist. Bray hypothesizes, on substantial grounds, that before 1650, and before the official acknowledgment of the existence of homosexual behavior, “the conflict between individual desire and the values of society as a whole” was resolved by a “cleavage … between an individual's behaviour and his awareness of its significance.”⁴⁸ Before 1650, that is, there was a happy collusion between the individual and his culture to deny the meaning of his behavior, since pederasts were considered monstrous. Thus, male homosexuality was an unacknowledged, but hardly unusual, activity in such respectable institutions as the public schools and the apprentice/master system.

What is known as lesbianism to the twentieth century, though frequently unacknowledged or trivialized by patriarchal culture, always has existed as a sexual behavior. On the one hand, social construction theory suggests that expressions of lesbian behavior, as well as definitions of and discourse about that behavior, vary from one era and culture to another since sexuality is a cultural construct rather than—as has been traditionally claimed in patriarchal culture—determined by nature.⁴⁹ On the other hand, current debates about an appropriate definition of lesbianism do not offer a satisfactory method for describing the erotic experience or self-understanding of women before the mid-eighteenth century, when acknowledgment of female sexuality was severely inhibited in English-speaking and other Western cultures. Bonnie Zimmerman summarizes the attempts by Adrienne Rich, Catharine Stimpson, and Lillian Faderman to establish a useful working definition of lesbianism for historical scholarship; she cautions us to avoid the “simplistic universalism” that results when we use the overly inclusive “lesbian continuum” described by Rich as well as the exclusive genital sexuality of Stimpson's definition, which may have political utility in the twentieth century but inhibits attempts to reconstruct female eroticism in earlier historical periods.⁵⁰ Faderman's work mediates between the definitions proposed by Rich and Stimpson by using the convention of “romantic friendship” to describe the erotic relations between women from the mid-eighteenth century to the historical moment in the twentieth century in which lesbians became self-identified. Yet Faderman's use of this convention, like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's reading of the language of nineteenth-century American women, leaves much to be desired: it evades the nature of the erotic content of much of the earlier literature she discusses and defuses its implications.⁵¹

To describe the historical consistency of erotic experience in women's friendship as it is expressed in literature and to identify a particular stance toward other women that partakes of the erotic, whether or not it is known actually to have culminated in behavior now described as sexual, we must revise Faderman's definition so that it includes the earlier periods and initiates a revaluation of earlier texts that does not diminish their possible erotic dimensions. We can begin this redefinition of lesbianism by reassessing earlier texts and reconsidering erotic relations between women as a possible dimension of their meaning. Because “the historical relationship between genital sexuality and lesbianism remains unclear,” we must first accept certain earlier texts as lesbian insofar as they convey an experience of passion or eroticism that expresses “libidinous energy,” whether or not it includes verifiable experience of genital activity.⁵² Second, we must be willing to acknowledge that the writers of these texts may have been lesbians insofar as they apparently understood and were able to convey “libidinous energy” between women, even though it may never be possible to know the precise nature of their sexual activities.⁵³ In this way, we do justice to the nature of their contents and perhaps also avoid a Procrustean distortion of the writer's experiences.

Although the validity of social construction theory is difficult to dispute, it is also true that earlier women writers lived and wrote in a patriarchal culture that obscured the nature of female sexuality and the contexts of women's writing. That being so, it is necessary to put aside heterosexist bias and homophobia in order to recognize the ways in which lesbian eroticism does indeed manifest itself.

Given this perspective, there is no question that Katherine Philips produced lesbian texts, that is, texts that are amenable to lesbian reading in the twentieth century. It is also possible that contemporary female readers of Philips's texts found in them those qualities that we call lesbian echoed in their own feelings and that this contributed to their popularity and influential status among later women writers, as well as to their neglect and/or disparagement by some twentieth-century female critics.⁵⁴ Whether, and to what extent, Philips might have expressed her homoerotic feelings genitally is impossible to assess without the availability of further biographical evidence and must remain for now a moot—and perhaps irrelevant—question.⁵⁵ However, the evidence surveyed here confirms that Philips's was indeed a lesbian experience. The passion Philips expressed in her poetry and in her letters, and the absence of its expression in other areas of her life (i.e., toward husband or children), indicates a fervor in her feelings for women that would not have been acceptable either to herself or to others except as given shape in conventional form. To name this experience “romantic friendship,” in conformity with the euphemizing language of the eighteenth century, would dilute the power of her poetry and deny her the full dimensions of her experience by perpetuating the trivialization of lesbianism. Therefore, we must acknowledge that her manipulations of the conventions of male poetic discourse constitute a form of lesbian writing.

We might argue, then, by analogy, that erotic behavior among respectable women was, until the last third of the nineteenth century, carried on in the same way as was male homoeroticism before 1650—that there was a “cleavage” between consciousness and behavior that allowed the individual and her society to evade naming the behavior—and that such erotic behavior was, in fact, later institutionalized and made acceptable by the convention of “female romantic friendship.” The work and life of Katherine Philips furnished an example that made possible the later acceptance of eroticized friendships between women as a respectable alternative to the specter of unnatural vice. Her example may also suggest that it is appropriate to reassess, from this perspective, the language and conventions through which “romantic friendship” has been expressed and to examine the extent to which we may have misread its erotic content.

Notes

1. See Philip Webster Souers, The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931); and the most recent edition of her work, Patrick H. B. Thomas, “An Edition of the Poems and Letters of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664” (Ph.D. diss., University College of Wales, 1982), xxviii-lviii, on Philips's reputation. Fidelis Morgan, The Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration (London: Virago, 1981), 3-11, esp. 3-4, quotes Keats's letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (September 21, 1817) distinguishing “one beautiful Mrs Philips” from other poets of her sex.

2. See Allan Pritchard, “Marvell's ‘The Garden’: A Restoration Poem?” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 23, no. 3 (1983): 371-88; Souers, 57-79; and Thomas, 74.

3. See Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England: 1363-1750 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 194-212.

4. Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 113-23, esp. 114; Morgan, 6; and Hilda L. Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 152-56, esp. 154.

5. See Allan Pritchard and Patrick Thomas, “Orinda, Vaughan and Watkyns: Anglo-Welsh Literary Relationships during the Interregnum,” Anglo-Welsh Review 26, no. 57 (1976): 96-102.

6. Jennifer R. Waller, “‘My Hand a Needle Better Fits’: Anne Bradstreet and Women Poets in the Renaissance,” Dalhousie Review 54 (Autumn 1974): 436-50, esp. 441.

7. See, e.g., Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 81-82; Moira Ferguson, ed., First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578-1799 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 102-13; Angeline Goreau, The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (Garden City, N.Y.: Dial Press, 1987), 15-16, 193-205; and Katharine M. Rogers and William McCarthy, eds., The Meridian Anthology of Early Women Writers (New York: Penguin, 1987), 373-75. An exception is Elizabeth H. Hageman's presentation of nineteen poems (“Katherine Philips: The Matchless Orinda,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson [Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1987], 566-608).

8. Waller, 444.

9. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Morrow, 1981), 68-71; and Souers, 276-77.

10. Sir Charles, in editing the 1667 edition, expanded the unauthorized 1664 quarto by including a letter he had received from Philips before her death; his own introduction; commendatory poems and eulogies by the earls of Orrery and Roscommon, Abraham Cowley, the anonymous Philo-Philippa, and others; some additional poems by Philips, including short translations from the French; and her Pompey and Horace. The editions of 1669, 1678, and 1710 are essentially reprints of the one edited by Sir Charles. The poems were not available again until George Saintsbury edited them, using the 1678 edition; see his Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 486-612. The two modern editions of Philips are those of Thomas (n. 1 above), which includes the Letters to Poliarchus (1705), the letters to “Berenice,” and a previously unpublished, unedited letter; and Catherine Cole Mambretti, “A Critical Edition of the Poetry of Katherine Philips” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1979). I have consulted the copies of the 1664 and 1667 editions, as well as the manuscript poems in the hand of Sir Edward Dering and the 1705 Letters, all of which are located in the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

11. Préciosité was a fashionable style associated with the literary salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet in Paris during the first half of the seventeenth century; it was originally characterized by “the pursuit of elegance and distinction in manners, style, and language, devising new and metaphorical expressions, avoiding low or barbarous words, and pursuing clearness and precision” (Sir Paul Harvey and J. E. Heseltine, eds., The Oxford Companion to French Literature [Oxford: Clarendon, 1959], 568). These qualities lent themselves to excess and, eventually, to parody by those not associated with the salon. Thomas accepts the view of Philips as a précieux poet on the grounds that préciosité is a form of coterie poetry particularly appropriate to the English Interregnum (xviii-xxi). Despite Henrietta Maria's introduction of this French literary and intellectual fashion into England in the 1630s, however, the cavalier poets (and Philips) do not conform to the closed society Odette de Mourgues finds necessary for préciosité to flourish: “What characterized English court lyricists (and the seventeenth-century Cavalier poets are a good illustration) is that they were more ready to absorb than to reject” (Metaphysical, Baroque, and Précieux Poetry [Oxford: Clarendon, 1953], 102-42, esp. 141). See Thomas (xxi-xxv) on Philips's so-called society of friendship. Though Thomas is critical of earlier attempts to reconstruct this society, his own account of its nature is also speculative. It remains unclear, for instance, to what extent the persons included by Philips in her society at various times knew each other, whether or not they ever met as an organized group, or whether, instead, inclusion might not have been used by Philips as a means of flattering and drawing closer to herself those whose friendship she sought. The degree of slippage between the possibly fictive ideal attributed to Orinda by her friend Sir Edward Dering and the reality may have been considerable (see letter to Anne Owen [Lucasia], written shortly after Philips's death, eulogizing Orinda's ideal society [quoted by Thomas, xxii]). An apparently similar slippage occurs in Philips's use of classical names, both for herself and for others. She seems to have used these in her social life as well as in her poetry: almost all her surviving letters are signed “Orinda,” and Sir Edward Dering uses the names familiar from her poetry in his letters both to her and to their mutual acquaintances (Letterbook, 1661-1665 [Ohio Historical Society microfilm, Philips MS. 14932]). This suggests that, for Philips and perhaps for a few of her friends, there was some conflation between the literary personae she created and the actual persons they were meant to represent. I have attempted to retain the quality of this ambiguity in the discussion that follows.

12. On Cowley, see Bruce King, Seventeenth-Century English Literature (New York: Schocken, 1982), 144; and Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 67-96.

13. Faderman (n. 9 above), 69-70; and Hageman (n. 7 above), 572-73, have also noted Philips's use of Donne.

14. Thomas, no. 59, 270-74. The text of Philips's works used here is that established by Thomas; all further references in my essay, as well as subsequent citations to Thomas, refer to his “An Edition of the Poems and Letters of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664.” Saintsbury's 1905 text, however, is the most readily available.

15. Thomas also notes the unusual intensity of this conceit but fails to locate its model in Donne (177).

16. Thomas quotes Rosemary Freeman (English Emblem Books [London: Chatto & Windus, 1948], 148) on the significance of the compasses in Donne as “an accepted emblem of constancy” (136-37).

17. See Faderman (n. 9 above), 65-68, for pertinent examples of earlier male friendship literature.

18. Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 256-59. Miner uses the term “cavalier winter” to describe the exclusion of royalists, among whom were the cavalier poets, from social and political power during the Interregnum.

19. See Souers (n. 1 above), 79-92; and Thomas, v, 3-4, 158-59, and 163-64. Upon the double murther of K. Charles, in answer to a libellous rime made by V.P. (1650-51), Philips's royalist reply to Vavasor Powell's poem attacking the memory of Charles I, seems to have become a useful tool in the hands of James Philips's political enemies, though he seems not to have attempted to restrain her expression of her sympathies. After the Restoration, her poems addressed to the newly restored royal family not only reflected the change in atmosphere which meant that poets could once again address the court, but they also reflected her concern for her husband's political situation and their mutual need for patronage.

20. See, e.g., Orinda to Lucasia parting, October 1661. at London (Thomas, [n. 1 above], no. 93, 430).

21. Lucy Brashear (“The Forgotten Legacy of the ‘Matchless Orinda,’” Anglo-Welch Review, no. 65 [1979], 68-76, esp. 72) also observes this omission: “One looks vainly for topics that provided the foundation of her life—home, family responsibilities, and personal joys and frustrations”; but her conclusion, that “finding no literary precedent to direct her, Orinda refused to write about her own experiences,” overlooks the important possibility that Philips was indeed writing about those experiences that “provided the foundation of her life” in writing about the emotional friendships that compensated for a less than absorbing domestic experience.

22. See On Rosania's Apostacy, and Lucasia's Friendship (Thomas, no. 68, 332-33), and Injuria amici (Thomas, no. 38, 182-83), probably also addressed to Rosania on the occasion of her marriage. Compare these with the more formal and perfunctory Rosania's private marriage (Thomas, no. 37, 178-79).

23. Letters 1-12 to Sir Charles (Thomas, 554-600) describe Philips's activities on behalf of his suit to Lucasia. Souers (123-27, and 132) has identified the “Calanthe” of these letters as Anne Owen (see also Thomas, viii and lxi). Orinda's relationship with Sir Charles was one of mutual benefit: as he sought to advance her husband and her career, so she encouraged his courting of Lucasia, though she seems to have had the additional motive of wanting to keep Lucasia nearby. Philips refers to the Italian postscripts inquiring after “Calanthe” in Sir Charles's letters, which she answers in English, apologizing that she can read but not write Italian. The enterprise thus had a rather clandestine air because “Calanthe” often asked after, and even seems to have read, some of Sir Charles's correspondence.

24. Thomas identifies “Berenice” as Lady Elizabeth Ker (or Carre), one of the daughters of Robert Ker, first earl of Ancram (216), but his argument for doing so is not entirely convincing. Philips had addressed her in To the Rt. Hono: the Lady E.C. (no. 45, 207-12), which is, like the letters to “Berenice,” full of breathless admiration.

25. The letters to “Berenice” were published in T. Brown, ed., Familiar Letters written by the late Earl of Rochester, with letters written by Mr. Thomas Otway and Mrs. K. Philips (London, 1697), sigs. K7^v-L8, esp. L4. The erotic tone of the letters to “Berenice” is even more striking when compared with that in the letters to Sir Charles or in the one surviving letter to Lady Temple (Thomas, Letter 53, 781-86), also aristocrats whose friendship and good will Philips was eager to propitiate but with whom she was clearly not intimate in the same way.

26. See “Pierre Corneille” in Harvey and Heseltine, eds. (n. 11 above), 170.

27. Thomas implies that Pompey is political allegory (723), while Jacqueline Pearson points out its contemporary relevance (The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642-1737) [New York: St. Martin's, 1988], 122). Jose (n. 12 above, 131) observes that “the word ‘restore’ runs like a leitmotif” throughout the play, which was performed in 1663.

28. Souers (n. 1 above), 148; Thomas concurs (vii-viii).

29. See also To the Lady E. Boyl (Thomas, no. 102, 455-56), To my Lady Ann Boyle's saying I look'd angrily upon her (Thomas, no. 85, 403), and To my Lady M. Cavendish, choosing the name of Policrite (Thomas, no. 95, 436-37), all written between 1662 and 1664, after the defection of Lucasia, and all exhibiting Orinda's consciousness of the difficulties of friendship with social superiors. Ann Boyle was known as “Valeria”; Mary Cavendish, whose maiden name was Butler, was a daughter of the duke of Ormonde. This dispersal of Philips's poetic affections among three different women is telling in light of the philosophy she had expounded in A Dialogue of Friendship multiplyed (Thomas, no. 97, 440-41): “The purity of friendship's flame” requires “that the hearts so close do knit, / They no third partner can admit.”

30. Stephen Latt, “The Progress of Friendship: The Topoi for Society and the Ideal Experience in the Poetry and Prose of Seventeenth-Century England” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1971), 74.

31. Ibid., 187.

32. Ibid., 184.

33. Reginald Heber, ed., The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, 15 vols. (London, 1822), 11:299-335, esp. 331. Philips takes up this issue in A Friend (Thomas, no. 64, 304a): “If soules no sexes have, for men 't' exclude / Women from friendship's vast capacity, / Is a design injurious and rude, / Onely maintain'd by partiall tyranny.”

34. Thomas, 56-57 and 263. See To the noble Palaemon on his incomparable discourse of Friendship (Thomas, no. 12, 53-54) and Friendship (Thomas, no. 57, 260-62).

35. Katherine Philips, Poems (London, 1667), sigs. al^v-a2 (also Saintsbury [n. 10 above], 493).

36. Ibid., sig. d1 (also Saintsbury, 498). Philo-Philippa's poem was one of the many verses and letters sent to Philips following the performance of Pompey. Philips's interest in Philo-Philippa no doubt contributed to Sir Charles's decision to include the latter's verses in his edition: “One of them, who pretends to be a woman, writes very well, but I cannot imagine who the Author is, nor by any Inquiry I can make, have hitherto been able to discover. I intend to keep that Copy by me, to shew it you when next we meet” (Letter 26, 658).

37. Philips, sigs. c1-c1^v (also Saintsbury, 496).

38. Delariviere Manley, The Royal Mischief (London, 1696), sig. A3^v. Similar references in the prefatory material to plays by women, chiefly linking Orinda and Astrea as precursors, continue through the 1690s into the beginning of the eighteenth century. See, e.g., the commendatory poems to Catherine Trotter that preface her plays, Agnes de Castro (1696), Fatal Friendship (1698), and The Unhappy Penitent (1701).

39. See “Orinda and Astrea” in Cotton (n. 3 above), 194-212; and Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 22-33. While female writers continued to admire the two divergent traditions fostered by the very different personal and literary styles of Philips and Aphra Behn, male writers disparaged the flamboyance of “Astrea's” behavior and writing.

40. Spencer also notes the persistent use of the comparison to Sappho, emphasizing its literary aspect (27-32). Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691; reprint, New York and London: Garland, 1973), sig. Cc2-Cc3^v, provides an example of the perpetuation of the literary strain of this compliment in the late seventeenth century.

41. John Duncombe, The Feminiad (London, 1754), sig. B2^v, lines 104-15.

42. Saintsbury, 488.

43. See Ovid, Heroides (Sappho to Phaon) 15.15-20, 201-2; Horace, Epistles 1.19.61, and Odes 2.13.24-25; and Longinus, On the Sublime 10.2. The translation from Ovid given here is Pope's 1707 version (The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963], 29, lines 17-18).

44. Lines 44-50. See Sir Herbert Grierson, The Poems of John Donne (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 110-12, for the complete text of this poem.

45. See “Sappho” in Pierre Bayle, An Historical and Critical Dictionary, 4 vols. (London, 1710), vol. 4, sigs. Rrr3-Rrr4, esp. Rrr3. Marie-Jo Bonnet, Un choix sans équivoque: Recherches historiques sur les relations amoureuses entre les femmes XVI^e-XX^e siècle (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1981), 23-34, gives a history of Sappho and of the use of tribade in French literature from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The term itself comes from the Greek τριβειν, used to identify a woman who engaged with other women in acts considered unnatural. The contemporary debate about Sappho's presumed lesbianism, which Bayle describes in his notes, still continues in the twentieth century. See Howard Jacobson, Ovid's “Heroides” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 290-99; and Judith P. Hallett, “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality,” and Eva Stehle Stigers, “Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho,” both in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 447-64 and 465-71, respectively, for an exposition of the arguments concerning the nature of Sappho's relations with women. Lesbian is of course a modern word, not in the Oxford English Dictionary in its present, sexualized meaning, and in the Victorian Century Cyclopedia only as a prim “amatory” or “erotic.”

46. Though the preponderance of studies address lesbianism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (e.g., Jane Rule, Lesbian Images [New York: Pocket Books, 1976]; Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, and Kathleen M. Weston, eds., “Special Issue: The Lesbian Issue,” Signs 9, no. 4 [Summer 1984]); and MarieJo Bonnet, Lillian Faderman, and Jeanette Foster (Sex Variant Women in Literature [1956; reprint, Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1985], 17-50) survey the evidence, written almost entirely by men, for female homoeroticism in earlier periods; and Judith C. Brown presents an extensively documented example of behavior in Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See also Ferguson, ed. (n. 7 above), 31-36, for a survey of early women's writing on love and friendship; and Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. 120-48, for an account of late seventeeth-century female attitudes toward sexuality.

47. Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, Aphra Behn, and Delariviere Manley were considered less than acceptable in polite society, and at least the duchess of Newcastle and Delariviere Manley may have been playing in these works to the libertinism of their audiences. The last three poems in Anne Killigrew's book, all three concerning passion between women, Upon a Little Lady … being the last, are preceded by a disclaimer denying her authorship (Anne Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986], 29-36, esp. 29).

48. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), 67-68.

49. Bonnet (n. 45 above, 11-190, passim) gives numerous examples of male definitions of “unnatural” activity between women before 1900 in France.

50. Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 177-210, esp. 183-88. See also Catharine Stimpson, “Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 243-59; and Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631-60. Rich's views have been the occasion of considerable discussion concerning their usefulness for historical scholarship: see Ann Ferguson, Jacquelyn N. Zita, and Kathryn Pyne Addelson, “On ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’: Defining the Issues,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 147-88.

51. Zimmerman addresses the difficulties inherent in Faderman's definition, as does Martha Vicinus in “Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 133-56, esp. 147-51. Martin Bauml Duberman (“‘I Am Not Contented’: Female Masochism and Lesbianism in Early Twentieth-Century New England,” Signs 5, no. 4 [Summer 1980]: 825-41, esp. 831, n. 5) comments on the sometimes tenuous distinction between sensuality and sexuality made by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in her classic study, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29.

52. Zimmerman, 186. While Zimmerman cautions critics to exercise judiciousness in reading texts by presumably heterosexual women, she points out that “if a text lends itself to a lesbian reading, then no amount of biographical ‘proof’ ought to be necessary to establish it as a lesbian text” (185). A further elaboration of this view can be found in Barbara Smith's 1977 reading of Toni Morrison's Sula, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 168-85; and Jean E. Kennard's reader-response theory, “Ourself behind Ourself: A Theory for Lesbian Readers,” Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 647-62. Perry (n. 46 above) uses the phrase “libidinous energy” to describe Mary Astell's expression of her feelings toward women but to deny Astell's lesbianism (141).

53. Lillian Faderman discusses the “techniques of bowdlerization” used by biographers to avoid recognizing erotic relations between women, and Francis Doughty asks, “Why are there different standards of evidence in establishing heterosexuality as opposed to homosexuality?” (“Who Hid Lesbian History?” and “Lesbian Biography, Biography of Lesbians,” respectively, both in Lesbian Studies: Present and Future, ed. Margaret Cruikshank [Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982], 115-21 and 122-27, esp. 123).

54. See, e.g., Lynch (n. 4 above), Morgan (n. 1 above), and H. Smith (n. 4 above). Kennard's theory (n. 52 above) is helpful in understanding their responses as those of resisting readers who sense an unacceptable eroticism in Philips and “seek to affirm themselves by a denial of ‘the other’ rather than through a full recognition of it” (658).

55. Stigers's account of Sappho (n. 45 above) bears consideration in relation to Philips: “Such love was separate from daily domestic life with a husband. … Sappho must have known enough of both the romantic yearning for transcendent union and the different quality of lesbian intimacy from heterosexual intimacy to create a romantic, alternate female world” (467).

I am indebted to Kathryn M. Kendall for suggesting that I write this essay; to my colleagues in the Medieval and Renaissance Seminar at Texas A& M University for their useful comments on an early draft; to the anonymous Signs reviewers and associate editors for their judicious suggestions; and to Quincy Spurlin and Melanie Hawthorne for helpful discussions. A version of this essay was presented at the National Women's Studies Association meetings, Rutgers University, June 1984. Research was made possible by grants from Texas A& M University, for which I am grateful.