SOURCE: Brashear, Lucy. “The Forgotten Legacy of the ‘Matchless Orinda.’” Anglo-Welsh Review 65 (1979): 68-76.

[In the following essay, Brashear documents how Philips's persona as a reluctantly published gentle-lady was contrived to ensure her own success but prohibited future British women from publishing poetry.]

Virginia Woolf believed that women were “trained” to be novelists rather than poets. In A Room of One's Own she described the restricted background of the “common sitting-room” as the most important influence responsible for the training of women writers at the time of Jane Austen in observing and analysing character. While Woolf's theory clarifies the peculiar aptitude of eighteenth and nineteenth century women for the novel genre, it does not explain their reluctance to follow the example of Queen Elizabeth and other “learned ladies” of the English Renaissance, such as the Countess of Pembroke, who was admired as a patron of poets as well as poet herself. Despite the decline of the learned-lady tradition and the discouragement of women from poetry during the period following Elizabeth's reign, the 1667 publication of the poems of Katherine Philips, known better as the “matchless Orinda”, dramatically revived the deference accorded women poets. Writing at a time when an aspiring woman poet was socially ostracized and publication virtually closed to her, Orinda's triumph proved that professional recognition for women poets was possible. Curiously, however, her achievement failed to revitalize the lyric strain so admired among the women of the Renaissance. On the contrary, with the exception of the poet Anne Finch, who failed to attain Orinda's popular success, no woman poet of distinction appeared after Orinda for a century and a half. Even though her recognition invested women poets with a new respectability and made it possible for those who followed to publish, paradoxically Orinda was responsible for the fact that women writers refrained from poetry and sought acceptance in prose fiction. An examination of two aspects of Orinda's literary reputation, her circle of friends and her poems on friendship, resolves this enigma.

Traditionally biographers have presented Orinda as the impresario of an elite intellectual society which she memorialised in poetry celebrating the virtue of friendship, but the exact nature of this social circle is uncertain. Based on one of her early poems, ‘To the Excellent Mrs. Anne Owen, upon receiving the Name of Lucasia, and Adoption into our Society, December 28, 1651’, the idea that Orinda presided over a literary coterie, whose members assumed classical pseudonyms, became generally accepted.¹ Orinda, however, made no mention of a fashionable salon in her writings and historical documents do not support this claim.² Philip Souers, her most recent biographer, believes her “society” was a limited and private group consisting of her most intimate women friends.³

Whether or not a “society” existed is beside the point. Undoubtedly Orinda found a circle of friends useful in her pursuit of literary recognition as an avenue of distribution for her poetry and as a sympathetic audience for her ideas on Platonic friendship. Despite her protestations to the contrary, Orinda's literary “soul”, unlike Emily Dickinson's, was not one to “select its own society / Then shut the door”. Friends meant readers and circulators of her poems, which, in turn, brought her to the threshold of literary repute, albeit at the backdoor. Even more important, certain of her friends were able to vanquish that last hurdle in the pathway to fame—publication. Rather than shun the “fair guerdon” of fame, Orinda shrewdly solicited “that last infirmity of noble mind” through the support and cooperation of friends.

The ploys Orinda used to become accepted as a friend by so many influential literary men are not documented; all that we know is that her background did not provide the necessary connections to introduce her to this select group. In addition to the handicap of being a woman, she was born to a middle-class London family and educated at Mrs. Salmon's school for girls. At the age of fifteen, she moved to the small community of Cardigan Priory, Wales, and within a few years married. It is remarkable indeed that within sixteen years Katherine Philips—a married woman of limited education, remote from the mainstream of the literary world—became a celebrity, familiarly called Orinda and admired by such notable men as Jeremy Taylor, Henry Lawes, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, and the Earls of Roscommon and Orrery. Her translation of Corneille's drama, Pompey, and its Dublin production were praised and her poems were welcomed at the Restoration Court of Charles II. Orinda was enthusiastically christened “matchless” and celebrated as England's first Sappho. Although other British women had written poetry,⁴ she was the first recognized publishing poet: between 1667 and 1710, four editions of her Poems appeared, as well as an unauthorized publication in 1664.

From the beginning of Orinda's writing career, her poems and letters reveal that she was fully aware of society's restrictions against a serious woman poet, especially one with an eye toward publication. If she were to see her poetry in print, someone other than herself would have to be responsible. Consequently, Orinda behaved the only way a lady of the seventeenth century could: she would have us believe that she shunned fame and was undeserving of professional recognition. In her poetry she self-effacingly deplores her “feeble hand”,⁵ but, nonetheless, claims that the respect she feels for venerable people requires her to commemorate their names in poetry. Her letters also make similar statements of her poetic ineptitude⁶ as well as betray an almost neurotic fear that people will think her secretly desirous of public acclaim (Poliarchus, pp. 128, 220-221, 224-225, 228-237; Temple, p. 41). The self-image she projects is that of a gentle and genteel woman who has dedicated her life to the practice of Platonic love as she interpreted it in her poems dealing with friendship. She portrays herself as a woman who yearned for a rural retreat with her friends (Poliarchus, pp. 148, 229) but who was reluctantly forced to become a part of the literary world. That she successfully promoted this image is proven by the anonymous tribute in the preface to her poems as a woman who did not desire “the fame of being in print” and “was troubled to be so exposed” (Saintsbury, p. 492).

Orinda's image of herself as a rural recluse who enjoyed only friends and “scribblings” is difficult to reconcile, however, with events she records in her letters: frequent trips to London brought about by manipulated strategies; a two-year stay in Dublin, fêted by the literati while Pompey was produced; her delight in the reception of this drama and the subsequent demand for its publication; the launching of a second Corneille translation, Horace; her keen interest in the translation of poetry as well as critical opinions on the art of poetry; and social intimacy with many distinguished literary people. These are all activities which suggest a woman vitally interested in the public life of a professional writer.

Despite Orinda's professed distaste for women poets to appear professional, she herself exerted close attention to minute details in the printing of her drama Pompey (Poliarchus, pp. 127-128). Although her name does not grace the title page—not even her initials—the literary world knew Orinda was the translator-poet, and she was celebrated, indeed, lionized, by society. As she encouraged circulation of the Pompey printings, as well as her occasional poems, she enjoyed the acclaim awarded a successful poet, even though she had misgivings in respect to initiating publication of her now sought-after poetry. No acceptable precedent sanctioning a woman's right to publish existed, and she was not of the mettle to call attention to herself by maverick behaviour as did the Duchess of Newcastle and later Aphra Behn.

In 1664, when she learned that an unauthorized printing of her poetry was in process, she wrote in alarm to Dorothy Osborne Temple, expressing anxiety that this publication would result in her social ostracism (p. 41). At the same time Orinda wrote similar letters to her friend Sir Charles Cotterell, deploring this “Accident” (p. 224). She painfully concluded that poetry is “a Diversion so unfit for the Sex to which I belong, that I am about to resolve against it for ever …” (p. 234) and reaffirmed that she “never writ a Line … with Intention to have it printed …” (p. 228). In deference to Orinda's wishes her friends used their influence and halted the fraudulent edition, but not before “many of the books were privately sold”, according to the writer of the preface to Orinda's authorized publication (Saintsbury, p. 490). Considering the remarkable excellence of the pirated edition and the advantages it offered to Orinda's career, it is tempting to speculate that she herself engineered the entire incident, but no evidence exists to this effect.

Orinda's apprehension of the damage to her social image were she to undertake publication herself were well founded. Undoubtedly, she vicariously shared the opprobrium accorded the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle. Even the usually generous Dorothy Osborne wrote to her future husband, Sir William Temple, chastising Lady Newcastle: “Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books, and in verse too”.⁷ Orinda, however, was strangely quiet on the subject of Lady Newcastle's poetry. Her single reference to this fantastic but remarkable woman occurs in a letter to Sir Charles in which she tells him of Edmund Waller's contempt for Lady Newcastle's poetry (p. 206). Orinda's version of this episode suggests that she, a writer like the Duchess, may anticipate similar treatment.

As a publishing poet, Orinda had more to fear than social ostracism. Long before the spurious printing, Orinda recognized that her writing might place her family also in an embarrassing—even shameful social position. In a mystifying poem written to her husband titled ‘To Antenor, on a Paper of mine which J. J. threatens to publish to prejudice him’ (p. 535), Orinda suggests that the printing of one of her poems might jeopardize her husband's reputation. She implies that the poem itself contains nothing defamatory, but rather that the sex of the writer herself is sufficient to do injury to her husband.

Thus, because of society's censure of women poets as well as her own apprehensions, Orinda chose to circulate her poems among friends. This procedure is described in several of her letters. To Sir Charles she sent a poem in commendation of the Queen, seeking his critical advice and, at the same time, prodding him to distribute it further (pp. 199-201). Later she sent the same poem to Dorothy Temple, soliciting her approval also (p. 40). In Orinda's last letter to “Worthy Poliarchus” (her name for Sir Charles), she candidly admits that she has freely circulated her poems but that she has been “betray'd” by her “dearest and best friends” (pp. 234-235), who she implies were responsible for permitting her work to reach the wrong hands. Although a self-righteous Orinda professes embarrassment when an unscrupulous printer threatened to publish a miscellany of her poems, she brought about her own literary theft by prodigal handouts.

Thirteen years prior to this last letter to Sir Charles, however, she had already benefited from the strategy of circulating her manuscripts; when she was only twenty, one of her poems appeared among the dedicatory tributes prefixed to the 1651 edition of William Cartwright's poetry. The title of the poem, ‘To the Memory of the most Ingenious and Vertuous Gentleman Mr. Will Cartwright, my much valued Friend', suggests a close relationship between them, but no record acknowledges their acquaintance. Furthermore, Orinda was still a child of twelve when Cartwright died. Although the truth of this “valued” friendship is still a mystery, the incident reveals that at a tender age Orinda cultivated the practice of expressing her admiration for individuals by writing them flattering lyrice which were then circulated as graceful compliments. Thus, a deluge of circulating lyrics may have been the means of attracting the attention of the compilers of the Cartwright volume, who then invited Orinda to contribute a dedicatory poem in the company of several esteemed contributors, five of whom were Henry Lawes, Henry Vaughan, Francis Finch, John Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Dering. In 1655 these worthies were assembled again to contribute to Henry Lawes's Second Book of Ayres, for which Orinda supplied both a prefatory and a friendship poem in her literary name.

This literary group may well have been an extension of her social circle back in Cardigan Priory, composed of her personal friends, who were called by such fictitious names as Lucasia, Rosania, Ardelia, and Charistus. Although none of Orinda's male literary friends are known to have lived close to her home, her writings chart a continuing familiarity with them and their inclusion in her special circle,⁸ thus insuring herself a broader circulation for her poetry.

Not only did Orinda's friends help circulate manuscripts but they also acted as a sounding board for her ideas on friendship. Fully half of her poetry is written to personal friends and deals with the subject of friendship.

Just as no precedent existed for the publication of women's poetry, none prescribed acceptable poetic topics for women poets. Had the youthful and inexperienced Orinda written solely for her own amusement, poetic matter would have been of small concern; but with a view toward circulation, she was sorely pressed to find subjects appropriate for a broad and sophisticated audience. Romantic lyrics written to one's husband were without a model; furthermore, they might not circulate. As for her children, only two poems—both elegies—refer to her son Hector. Custom prescribed the right to record her grief over the death of a son, but none to convey her feelings at hs birth. No mention is ever made of her namesake daughter Katherine. One looks vainly for topics that provided the foundation of her life—home, family responsibilities, and personal joys and frustrations.⁹ The conclusion is inescapable: finding no literary precedent to direct her, Orinda refused to write about about her own experiences.

Consequently, she turned to the recognized writers of the School of Donne and the Tribe of Ben for literary models. In particular, however, she derived the theme of Platonic love upon which she founded her friendship poems from the poetry of Cavalier England. Since social custom forbade her a counterpart to Waller's Sacharissa, the half-imaginary woman whom Waller memorialized in poetry, Orinda moulded the concept of Platonic friendship to suit her distinctive needs as a woman poet and wrote many of her poems to women friends. In this respect she clearly violated the Renaissance concept restricting friendship to men only,¹⁰ a practice she openly challenged in her poem, ‘A Friend’:

If souls no sexes have, for men t'exclude
                    Woman from Friendship's vast capacity,
Is a design injurious or rude,
                    Only maintain'd by partial tyranny.
Love is allow'd to us and Innocence,
And noblest friendships do proceed from thence.

(p. 561, stanza iv)

Orinda may have been criticized for upholding an unorthodox position or perhaps she was troubled by her own iconoclasm. Whatever the reason, she asked the renowned churchman, Jeremy Taylor, to clarify “How far a dear and a perfect friendship is authorized by the principles of Christianity?” In his response¹¹ Taylor defined friendship primarily as a male virtue, enjoyed by a few women, usually in their relationships with their husbands (p. 94). Despite his reservations, the good Divine instruction, ten rules governing it (pp. 95-98). Ignoring Taylor's clear condemnation of Platonic friendship as “tinsel dressings” (p. 81), she continued to write friendship poems, elevating friendship to a believable and sincere expression of human virtue. Of even more importance, Orinda was the first recognized English poet to suggest that women could genuinely like and admire each other.

Orinda's final reward of knowing her poems would be published came about as a result of the unauthorizing printing. Although she had succeeded in suppressing this publication, some of the copies were still in existence, a situation which virtually required a corrected edition. Urged by friends to replace the surreptitious edition, melodramatically she put the entire matter into the capable hands of Sir Charles: “… if you still judge it absolutely necessary to the Reparation of this Misfortune … I shall resolve upon it with the same Reluctancy that I would cut off a Limb to save my Life” (p. 233). Ironically, while Orinda was in London, being urged by friends to publish, she was fatally stricken with small-pox. Nevertheless, within three years her poems were published, followed by three later editions. Her letters to Cotterell were also published in two editions.

Orinda's tenuous position as a serious writer can best be appreciated by reference to a tribute in the preface to her 1667 edition in which an anonymous writer describes her poems as “no disgrace to the name of any Man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembered that they fell hastily from the pen but of a Woman”. In the face of this obstinate attitude toward women poets evident even among her friends, Orinda's elaboration machinations and covert stratagems to attain literary recognition are understandable as well as admirable.

Sweet as Orinda's success story is, her career was an impossible one to follow. The role of “reluctant poetess” who writes lyrics to her friends—and who wasn't her friend?—is an obvious ruse that is good but one time around. Further, lyrics apostrophizing friendship were considered ingenious from the pen of Orinda, but “slavish” from others. Joan Philips, Lady Wharton, Jane Barker, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe all published soon after Orinda,¹² but none were awarded her distinction despite their obvious emulation of both her art and methods.

It is unfortunate that when Orinda opened the door for other women poets, her image became the critical yardstick for measuring their poetry. For example, John Dryden approved of the poems of Elizabeth Thomas because they were “too good to be a Woman's” and reminded him of Orinda's;¹³ however, he cautioned Thomas to avoid the “Licenses” of Mrs. Behn (p. 127). Dryden compared his gifted protégée, Anne Killigrew, to Orinda also (‘Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew', 11, 162-164). Other men of critical discernment admired Orinda and contributed to her deification: John Evelyn, for one, in a letter to the Duchess of Newcastle, included Orinda's name in a list of great women from the ancients to the moderns.¹⁴

In a poem titled ‘Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another', Anne Killigrew complained bitterly of the deference granted Orinda:

What she did write, not only all allow'd,
But ev'ry Laurel, to her Laurel, bow'd. …(15)

In a similar vein, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, realistically appraised the impossibility of ever escaping Orinda's shadow.

Nor shalt thou reatch Orinda's prayse,
          Tho' all thy aim, be fixt on Her.(16)

Lady Winchilsea's friend, Alexander Pope, however, never mentioned Orinda, her poems, or her letters in any extant record. Despite this curious omission, Pope's familiar image, “this long Disease, my Life” (‘An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot', 1, 132), first appeared as the opening line of a poem by Orinda titled ‘Song to the Tune of Adieu, Phillis’: “'Tis true our life is but a long disease …” (p. 578). In addition to this similarity six other instances are also cited in the Twickenham Edition of Pope.¹⁷ Further, Orinda's experimentation with the philosophical verse essay and the closed heroic couplet indicates another kind of resemblance which, in turn, suggests that Orinda may have exerted an unacknowledged influence on the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Orinda's career, however, had an opposite effect on women writers. Although they continued to pay court to her memory, those of the stature of Aphra Behn, Mary Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and Mary Wollstonecraft turned to prose, anticipating the women novelists of the nineteenth century. It is significant that a century after Orinda's death Samuel Johnson felt no obligation to include the name of the first recognized woman poet in his Lives of the Poets; on the other hand, he enthusiastically supported the young novelist, Fanny Burney. Whether or not women were “trained” to the novel, as Virginia Woolf supposed, they could certainly see that recognition was more accessible in the field of prose fiction.

Lionized in her own time and deified by succeeding generations, Orinda, whose image was truly “matchless,” unwittingly but effectively preempted the field of poetry from other women for well over a century and, as a consequence, suppressed the beginnings of a poetic movement among their numbers. Despite her illustrious reputation as a poet, however, she has become a legend associated with the dilettantism of the Précieuse school and ironically her real legacy has been forgotten: in the face of the united powers of tradition and authority, Orinda proved that a woman poet was capable of earning professional recognition; just as important, she elevated the position of all women by insisting that they, as well as men, were worthy of sharing and expressing the noble virtue of friendship.

Notes

1. George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (1905; rpt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), I, 487. Subsequent references to the 1667 publication of Katherine Philips's Poems, including the preface, will be from this edition and noted in the text. See also George W. Bethune, The British Female Poets, Essay Index Reprint Series (1848; facsimile rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), p. 28; Edmund Gosse, Seventeenth Century Studies, 4th ed. (Londin: William Heinemann, 1913), p. 232.

2. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660, 2nd ed. rev. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 129.

3. Philip Webster Souers, The Matchless Orinda, Harvard Studies in English, 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 78. Subsequent biographical details in the life of Katherine Philips will be from this book.

4. Although the Duchess of Newcastle's poetry, Poems and Fancies (1653), appeared fourteen years before Orinda's, Lady Newcastle's poems, which were publshed by her husband, did not receive critical approval from the literary community.

5. “To the Countess of Roscommon, with a Copy of Pompey”, Saintsbury, p. 592, 1. 30.

6. Philips, Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (London, 1705), pp. 128, 148, 180, 199—202, 219, 234-235. Subsequent references from the letters of Katherine Philips to Sir Charles Cotterell with be from this edition and noted in the text; see also Katherine Philips's letters to Dorothy Temple in the following edition: Julia G. Longe, ed., Martha, Lady Gifford: Her Life and Correspondence (London: George Allen and Sons, 1911), p. 40. Subsequent references to this letter will be taken from this book.

7. Dorothy (Osborne) Temple, Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-1654, ed. Edward Abbott Parry (London, 1888), p. 100.

8. Three of these literary friends were also given pseudonyms: Francis Finch became “Palaemon” (as was Jeremy Taylor also); Birkenhead became “Cratander” (an uncertain identity but supported by Souers); and Dering became “Silvander”. Although Orinda wrote congratulatory poems to both Lawes and Vaughan, she did not call them by fictitious names.

9. Orinda wrote three poems to her husband and in one poem celebrates her own birthday, “On the first of January, 1657”.

10. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 140: “For the most part love was taken to be an affair between men and momen, and friendship strictly confined to men”.

11. Jeremy Taylor, “A Disource of the Nature and Offices of Friendship”, The Whole Works, ed Reginald Heber (1847-1854; rpt. Nem York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), I, 69-98. Subsequent references to this essay will be from this edition.

12. Joan Philips, Ephelia, Female Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1679); Lady Anne Wharton, Verses by the Excellent Poetess, Mrs. Wharton (London, 1688); Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations Consisting of Original Poems, Songs, Odes, etc. With Several New Translations. In Two Parts. Part I. Occasionally Written by Mrs. Jane Barker. Part II. By Several Gentlemen of the Universities and Others. (London, 1688); although Mrs. Rowe revealed an unorthodox feminine militancy in some of the poems, her preoccupation with friendship and purity drew from her admirers a favourable comparison to Orinda. Her works appear in Ephelia. Female Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1696).

13. Charles E. Ward, ed., The Letters of John Dryden (1942; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1965), p. 125. Subsequent references to Dryden's letters will be from this book.

14. William Bray, ed., Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn (London: Georpe Routledge & Sons, n. d.), pp. 653-654.

15. Anne Killigrew, Poems, introd. Richard Morton (1686; facsimile rpt. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967), p. 46.

16. Myra Reynolds, ed., “The Preface”, The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (1903; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 7.

17. John Butt, ed., Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1938-1962), II, 307, 321n, 325n, 341n; III, 1. 45n 60n; and IV, 105n.