SOURCE: "A Feminist Link in the Old Boys' Network: The Cosseting of Katherine Philips," in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecelia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1991, pp. 71–104.

The Restoration is significant in the history of English feminism because it witnessed the advance of women playwrights in the professional theater. The first decade of the Restoration was graced by four newcomers: Katherine Philips (Pompey, 1663; Horace, 1668), Frances Boothby (Marcelia, 1670), Aphra Behn (The Forc'd Marriage, 1670), and Elizabeth Polwhele (The Faithful Virgins, [1670/71]). Behn was the most prolific and commercially successful in this first wave of dramatic ingénues. Boothby and Polwhele the most obscure. Katherine Philip's place in this cluster of female dramatists is preeminent, as it was Philips who first broke ground for women in the English and Irish theater. For a brief moment in theater history, Philips was a cause célèbre, and her dazzling career provided the important precedential model for aspiring literary women. Philips was the first "Sappho" of the English-speaking world, and the first woman to have her work produced on the Dublin and London stage. Her success, in fact, may well have pointed the way for Behn; for when Behn made her début with The Forc'd Marriage, mounted by the Duke's Company in the summer of 1670, she was succeeding Philips, whose dramatic translations from Pierre Corneille had been enthusiastically received several years before.

Katherine Philips's contemporary fame rested on two translations from the French classical tragedy of Corneille: his La Mort de Pompée (1642), translated by Philips in 1663 and brilliantly staged the same season in Dublin's new Theatre Royal in Smock Alley; and Corneille's Horace (1640), partially translated by Philips shortly before her sudden death in 1664, and produced in 1668 at Dublin's Theatre Royal and also before the court of Charles II. Philips's Pompey and Horace were published soon after their premieres, and each saw sell-out editions in Dublin and London. (The first issue of the Dublin Pompey, 500 copies, was sold within weeks.) Philips's reputation as "the Matchless Orinda," rapturous poet of "female Friendship," came slightly later and now is seeing a revival. But Philips initially made her mark in the Anglo-Irish theatre, not the poetic coteries of the Restoration court.

Notices on Philips after her death do not scant her dramatic talent. Estimates in David Erskine Baker's Biographica Dramatica (1764), for example, celebrate her success in playwrighting. And contradicting Sir Edmund Gosse's assessment that Katherine Philips "sank into utter darkness" in the early eighteenth century is William Roberts's work, which traces something of Philips's popularity up through the late 1800s. Philips's rapid ascent to celebrity was astonishing, given harsh male prejudice against women writers at that time. Her chaste, comely verse and unimpeachable reputation set the standard for female excellence. In fact, so dominant was the cult of "Orinda" during the later-Stuart period that women writers, especially poets, found themselves hard-pressed to compete with Philips, and so began working alternative literary markets—drama, essay-periodical, and particularly the novel. But no matter how overdrawn the portrait, Katherine Philips showed that a public career in literature was possible for a woman in the seventeenth century, even if she were a commoner. While Philips's oeuvre is lean—a single published folio of 116 original poems and five versetranslations from the French, two dramatic translations from Corneille, and an incomplete collection of letters—"Orinda" was the undisputed darling of her era and the most celebrated woman in seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish letters.

Reassessing a legend is dangerous business. But in the case of Katherine Philips, whose achievement has been overstated since the late seventeenth century (to the detriment of more skilled women writers), some contextualizing of Philips's life, work, and career is long overdue. The obvious weakness in almost all Philips studies to date is an inability to appreciate the "Orinda" myth for what it really was: a remarkable literary campaign conceived and promoted by Philips herself, her relatives, and some of the literary bosses of the Restoration old boys' network.

Philips's grand if brief career was a collaborative product created by Philips and several powerful male allies. Her principal literary productions—the Corneille translations—were orchestrated by influential men of the late seventeenth-century literary world. Philips found effective comrades in Stuart London, Dublin, and southwest Wales, the triple base, as we shall see, of her elaborate operations. Without in any way wishing to discredit Katherine Philips (indeed her support by preeminent men of letters further attests to her talent), I am eager to explore this underplayed aspect of her career as a case-study in supportive relations between men and women of letters at this time. Moreover, based on Philips's published correspondence, it appears that her camaraderie with male confidants and literary advisors resulted in a progressive unfolding of a surprisingly assertive authorial ego.

With the single exception of Lucy Brashear's essay on Philips in The Anglo-Welsh Review in 1979, this dimension of Philips's artistic temperament and career has been overlooked in Philips studies thus far. Brashear suggests that Philips always was on the climb, dating from her early days in Wales in the 1650s, when she strategically began creating the "Orinda" persona by broadly circulating her poems, and, moreover, by addressing them to notables of only slight acquaintance, such as Henry Vaughan, one of Philips's many new Welsh relatives after her marriage in 1648. Brashear even (ingeniously) suggests that Philips may well have "engineered" the pirated edition of her own poems in 1664.

My reconstruction of Philips, slightly more tempered and comprehensive, takes into account the full play of "Orinda" 's support-base and its strong influence throughout the three phases of her career, a career distinguished by its astute management, networking, and heretofore unacknowledged artistic individualism. But before I can begin to properly make my case, the stage must first be set for Philips's entrance with some introductory remarks on the sensitive literary climate of the Restoration and its representation in today's feminist criticism.

Prologue: Feminist Angst vs. the Politics of Female Authorship

My genealogical researches into the powerful Phillipps clan, seated at Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire, Wales, the line into which Katherine Philips nèe Fowler married in 1648, have led me to a fresh perspective on the phenomenon of the professional English woman writer who first emerged during the later-Stuart period. As we know, many women writers began to go public during the Restoration. Some asserted their new literary identity by publishing their initials on the title pages of their work. Others, such as Sarah Egerton, Jane Barker, Anne Lady Winchilsea, and Mary Lady Chudleigh, boldly published their surnames. Observing the broad literary and political connections of the Phillipps group in Wales and its key role in launching Katherine Philips, I have begun to examine the professional beginnings and sponsorship of other women writers of their period (particularly the poet-playwright "Ephelia," apparently of the interrelated Proud-Phillips-Milton line) with an eye to the largely unacknowledged role of their male allies and the networks they sometimes made available to the young female entrants.

This new line of inquiry is frankly deconstructive of the new feminist reconstructive criticism. So we begin by looking at things squarely. The new recovery work on women writers of the Restoration and eighteenth century has produced both admirable results and questionable tendencies. On the positive side, it has performed superlatively: by resurrecting a new canon of obscured writings; by identifying female coteries and patronesses; by producing at a brisk rate a body of new reference tools, biographies, and criticism; and by reprinting many essential feminist texts heretofore out of print for generations. This flurry of aggressive feminist activity in the American, British, and Canadian academies bodes well for a deep reconstruction of the canon, with women writers more equitably represented.

Yet, despite its appreciated gains, a fair amount of the recent criticism promotes a point of view (by now almost a premise) which is disturbing and historically unsupportable. I refer to the perception that insists on an adversarial relationship between men and women of letters. Promoters of such a vantage point romanticize female professionals, especially the writers, as a disenfranchised, beleaguered minority whose work was carried out in some sort of vague literary and psychological isolation. The more strident adherents speak of male "victimization" of women. Exclusivity, otherness, and, above all, feminist angst are assigned these "pioneers" as inevitable conditions of their gender and "unique" historical position. One commentator on Restoration literature [Angeline Goreau] writes [in Reconstructing Aphra, 1980]: "[Aphra Behn] was a writer who not only insisted on being heard, but [who] successfully forced the men who dominated the jealous literary world of Restoration England to receive her as an equal. … I began a life of Aphra and saw in her a heroine … a feminist heroine." A historian [Hilda Smith, in Reason's Disciples, 1982] characterizes early English women writers as a distinct social and intellectual subgroup, hellbent on feminist reform: "They were mavericks, operating in a largely hostile environment, who employed bits and pieces of the social and intellectual criticism they found about themselves to understand and to change women's lives." A third example comes to hand from a feminist literary critic [Mary Poovey] who claims [in The Proper Lady and the Woman Write, 1984] that women writers suffered ordeals of identity, as cultural definitions of female propriety condemned individualism and certainly the pursuit of a career: "The struggle each of these women waged to create a professional identity was in large measure defined by the social and psychological forces of this ideal of proper—or innate—femininity." Feminist anthologists are now joining the fray with descriptions of women writers as "guerrilleras" storming the bastions of the patriarchal establishment. Broad historical judgments and psychologizing of this nature have begun to appear with increasing frequency in feminist studies. These tendencies, I suggest, are misleading because they do not stand up against available historical evidence on how women of the pre-Modern era broke into literary professions and began shaping careers. Now, unarguably, the young women writers of the early-modern era were mercilessly ridiculed by some male writers. Robert Gould, an undervalued Restoration poet-playwright, attacks Behn and "Ephelia" in his blistering antifeminist Satyrical Epistle as "hackney Writers" whose verse was "as vicious as their Tails" (1691). Anne Countess of Winchilsea was roundly jeered by Pope's circle in Three Hours After Marriage, a successful farce of 1717. Artemisia, the female speaker in Rochester's most polished social satire, A Letter from Artemisia … to Chloe (1679), begins her verse-epistle with a thirty-one-line summary of contemporary male bias against women writers. "Whore is scarce a more reproachful Name / Than Poetess," she writes her friend. Moreover, women were systematically barred from such early old boys' networks as the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, the Royal Society, and that prototype of the English club, the ubiquitous coffee house. Yet, the record also shows that women's writings did get into print. This hard fact of history suggests that overt patriarchal oppression of women did not carry over into the literary establishment; if it had, then work would not have been published and sponsored at all. The flourishing London book trade (the commercial arm of the literary old boys' network) appreciated the market potential of the new books by women. And, as the women went on to show, theirs was not ephemeta but work of lasting value. Publishers cultivated this new breed of writer through complimentary prefaces which, in turn, stimulated interest in the buying public. Benjamin Crayle promoted Jane Barker in his edition of her Poetic Recreations (1688). Richard Bassett remarked on the uniqueness of a book he published in 1700. The Nine Muses, a collection of elegies on the death of Dryden written exclusively by women. Bernard Lintot, publisher of Pope's Homer, ensured a receptive audience for Katherine Philips's Letters, which he published in 1705, by soliciting commendatory verses for the book. Other London bookmen, such as James Courtney. John Taylor, and James Nott, publishers respectively of Female Roems … By Ephelia (1679), Sarah Egerton's Female Advocate (1687), and Egerton's Poems (1703), gave visibility to their new authors and, moreover, heightened their commercial profile, by seeing their work through subsequent editions.

Then, as now, an integral dynamic in the politics of authorship was finding a place on the circuit. This meant establishing bonds and useful contacts with contemporaries who had already "arrived." Comandeering the authorship circuit, of course, was that well-oiled machine of the literary brotherhood, the old boys' network, a private-lyheld club of literary brokers who materially determined the success or failure of many careers. We know, for example, that senior male writers sometimes made themselves available to sponsor and advise their talented male juniors. Dryden gave a healthy boost to the early career of William Walsh by gracing Walsh's Dialogue Concerning Woman (1691) with a substantial preface. Or consider the early career of John Gay. In a letter dated 23 August 1714, Pope advised the young Gay on his Fan, a courtship-and-marriage allegory. Sir Richard Steele also assisted Gay when he recommended The Fan in The Englishman (10 December 1717), one of Steele's several successful essay-periodicals. Consider, too, the team of classical translators who assisted Dryden in his Juvenal of 1692. And Pope proceeded similarly, with a battery of "Auxiliaries," in launching his Homer during the period 1712 to 1726. There was also the Scriblerus Club, that literary fraternity of Pope, Swift, Gay, Parnell, Harley, and Arbuthnot, which produced satire on bad writers and "false Taste." Examples of such professional camaraderie, fraternal links, and career-boosting are legion in the careers of professional men of letters. To a large extent, this is the very stuff of literary history.

But not a few of the literary "good ole boys" also gave a generous hand-up to so-called petticoat-authors, especially at the outset of their careers. Rochester and Dryden, though members of rival coteries, found a mutual friend in Aphra Behn, and they collaborated with her to a far greater extent than Behn scholars have yet to acknowledge. Dryden is especially interesting on this score. As his foremost bibliographer observed, Dryden was "something of a favorite with the [literary] ladies." This is an important dimension of the laureate's literary life which James Winn broaches in his impressive John Dryden and His World (1987) and which he presently is examining in a study of gender in Dryden's aesthetics. Dryden counselled the young poet Elizabeth Thomas (his "Corinna"); he expressed to Walsh and Jacob Tonson respectful interest in the verse of Mary Lady Chudleigh; and he was so well regarded by his female contemporaries that upon his death in 1700 he was honored by the collection of their elegies, mentioned above. Further evidence exists in supportive relationships between John Dunton and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Swift and Delariviére Manley, Joseph Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft, and George Hickes and Elizabeth Elstob.

Female authorship was a sensitive literary and social issue throughout the Restoration and most of the eighteenth century. No one close to the material denies that. But the facts also show that the victimization school of feminist studies lacks historical grounding. As the literary register tells us, the old boys' network was not without some female rewards.

Katherine Philips: A Life and A Career (in Three Acts)

The brief but successful dramatic career of Katherine Philips is a fine case-study in supportive partnership between literary men and women. Indeed, Philips's entire literary life, from her Pompey (1663) to her Poems (1667), and Letters (1705), was carefully managed by influential male confidants, relatives, and literary associates. Moreover, as her correspondence reveals, Philips's guided initiation in the politics of authorship was evidently so gratifying an experience that she began to develop a confident sense of herself as an important, independent presence of her day. Because her personal background is essential to my case, let me illustrate the privileged career development and marketing of Katherine Philips within the main lines of her biography.

1. London

The first phase of Philips's life centered in London, site of her early beginnings. Katherine Phillips née Fowler was born in London in 1631 into an upper-middle-class English family. Her father, John Fowler, was a prosperous tradesman, a "clothmaker." Her mother, Katherine Oxenbridge, had married down in her match with Fowler, as she descended from a prestigious English pedigree of the fourteenth century, one which included Dr. Daniel Oxenbridge of the Royal College of Physicians and Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhittnée Oxenbridge, a ladyin-waiting to Queen Katherine Parr and governess to Princess Elizabeth Tudor. Lady Tyrwhitt, one of two writing women in Katherine Philips's maternal line, produced Morning and Evening Prayer, dedicated to Elizabeth and preserved in the British Library. A second literary model for young Katherine Philips would have been her maternal grandmother Katherine Oxenbridge née Harby, an amateur poet and an acquaintance of the poet Francis Quarles. To date, Philips scholars have failed to suggest that Katherine Philips was quite plausibly inspired by these two precedential models of female authorship in her own family. This often is the case among early women writers, I have found, whose models are traceable through their matrilineal line.

Literate around the age of four, according to contemporary accounts, young Katherine received training in the rudiments at home, from her cousin the governess Mrs. Blackett. At the age of eight, she began formal training at Mrs. Salmon's fashionable boarding-school for girls at Hackney, where the precocious Philips displayed signs of literary aptitude. It was here that she made her first principal career contact in the person of Mary Aubrey, of the distinguished Welsh royalist Aubreys, who became the dear "Rosania" of Philips's poems. Mary Aubrey helped to ensure Philips's fame by relating essential facts of her life and career to her cousin John Aubrey, whose biographical sketch of Philips continues to be the foundation of all Philips studies, from Philip Souers's monograph (1931) down to the Rev. Patrick Thomas's useful Ph.D. dissertation (1982, University of Wales). This schoolgirl relationship between Philips and Mary Aubrey blossomed into enduring friendship. Most important of all, it was the first of several profitable connections between Katherine Philips and the Welsh peerage.

2. Wales

The second phase of Katherine Philips's life and nascent literary development centered in Wales, that lesser London to the west which gave us such literary personalities as John Aubrey, the Vaughans, Nell Gwyn, and the blind poet Anna Williams of Samuel Johnson's circle. The 1640s were turbulent years for young Katherine and her mother. John Fowler, Katherine's father, died in 1642, after which Katherine's mother married one George Henley of London at St. Andrew's Church on 4 May 1643. But this second marriage was also short-lived, and again we find Katherine Philips's mother a widow. But again she remarried, so that by 1646 Katherine's mother was the second wife of a prominent landowner in the Welsh peerage. At the age of fifteen, young Katherine left London with her mother to relocate to Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales. This would soon become the scene of her literary apprenticeship.

Katherine's second stepfather was Sir Richard Phillipps, second Baronet, of the Picton Castle Phillipps line, a prestigious family in the Welsh peerage and wealthy landowners with broad social and political ties throughout Wales, England, and Ireland. This Welsh clan was also a strong literary and philanthropic power in southwest Wales, as active benefactors of unfortunate writers. A widower when he married Katherine's mother, Sir Richard was related by law to the Dryden line, as his first wife was Elizabeth Dryden, an aunt of John Dryden's. The poet-laureate of the Restoration, then, was a cousin of Katherine Philips's. Dryden acknowledged their kinship and acquaintance in a letter to the young poet Elizabeth Thomas, published by Charles Ward. It was Philips's relative Dryden who promoted her as "Matchless," a seldommentioned but significant fact in Philips studies; and, as Cowley would do in an elegiac ode to "Orinda" prefixed to the first authorized edition of her work in 1667, Dryden praised Philips as the female laureate of the Restoration in his elegiac ode to the poet-painter Anne Killigrew (1685).

When Katherine Philips's second stepfather died in 1648, Dame Phillipps soon took a fourth husband, Major Philip Skippon, also a Welsh notable. Skippon died in 1660. Four times widowed, Katherine Philips's mother had become one of the wealthiest women in Wales. By the time of her death in 1678, she would live to see her daughter a wife, mother, poet, dramatic translator, and literary toast of the English-speaking world.

Marriage, motherhood, and the poetic celebration of platonic friendship between women were the principal concerns of Katherine Philips's late teens and early womanhood. Her mother and their new Welsh relations had selected a husband for young Katherine, one James Philips of Cardigan. A widower and Oxford men, Philips was a Parliamentarian and a political power in southwest Wales and in London. He also was related by blood and marriage to the Picton Castle Phillipps line. At the time of their marriage in August 1648, Katherine was seventeen years old, James Philips fifty-four. For an arranged marriage, theirs was a reportedly happy union, which produced two children, a son Hector, who died in infancy (see "On Little Hector Philips," Katherine's most affecting lyric), and a daughter Katherine, who married into the prominent Wogan family of Boulston, Pembrokeshire, also a cadet branch of the ancient Phillipps line.

Before her public life in literature, Katherine Philips composed intimate lyrics for a small circle of Welsh friends and relatives. Fame never was a goal early on, or so she adamantly claimed in her letters. Philips confined herself to Cardigan during the late 1640s and throughout the 1650s, attending to new domestic duties, but also producing a substantial body of verse devoted largely to her signature theme, female friendship. The center of Philips's emotional life, one gathers, was not hearth and home, but rather the affectionate relationships she cultivated with the two principal adepts of her "sacred society of Friendship," Mary Aubrey (her "Rosania") and especially Mrs. Anne Owen née Lewis of Orielton, another family relation, and the beloved "Lucasia" of Katherine Philips's most expressive lyrics. Mrs. Owen lived in Llandshipping, southeast of Picton Castle and only twenty-five miles from Katherine's new home, The Priory in Cardigan. While Philips's verse is ostensibly innocent of explicit sapphic sentiment, a subtle psychosexual subtext sometimes appears to operate in her wooing and courtship poems to women, and probably merits some attention from Philips scholars.

Philips's juvenilia, if not her entire canon, display a broad, eclectic reading in English and especially French literature, as préciosité had been brought into vogue by Henrietta Maria, the French queen-consort of Charles I. Essentially derivative in imagery and technique, Philips's early verse also displays the influence of William Cartwright, a Cavalier poet, playwright, and divine, who enjoyed a high reputation in his day. Philips paid homage to her English master (whom she soon would replace with a French one) in a poem beginning, "Stay, Prince of Phansie," prefixed to Cartwright's Poems (1651). This minor publication was Philips's first literary credit, and it gave her immediate local visibility. As in Cartwright's verse, Philips's poems are heavily freighted with the poetic effects of three traditions: (1) Classical and Renaissance traditions of platonic love and platonic friendship; (2) préciosité, abundantly represented in the French élégie and the mannered salon verse of Voiture and other devotees of the Hôtel de Ramboüillet; and (3) English "wit," as displayed in the poetic ingenuities of Donne and others of the "metaphysical" school. But Philips wisely distinguished her adaptations of these traditions by introducing into her verse a decidedly feminine feature: ardent friendship between women. By in effect "feminizing" the existing traditions in love-poetry formulated by male poets. Philips founded the first English school of an explicitly feminine poetic, a worthy facet of her work that should be explored.

It was in 1662, during an extended visit to Dublin with the newly-married "Lucasia," that Katherine Philips's life and literary aspirations took the sudden turn that catapulted her from the enclosure of Cardigan to the public light of celebrity: Enter Roger Boyle, first Baron Broghill and first Earl of Orrery.

3. Dublin

It was Dublin, not London or Cardigan, that was the site of Philips's career. In Dublin, Philips was "discovered" and her career launched. There, she met several influential Irish and transplanted English nobles and literary bosses who fostered her talent and materially made her career possible.

Two, perhaps three, matters prompted Philips to leave Cardigan for Dublin in 1662. First, she refused to part with her beloved "Lucasia." Mrs. Owen, newly widowed, had recently married the royalist Welsh colonel Marcus Trevor, first Viscount Dungannon and Baron Trevor of Rostrevor. Philips insisted she accompany the new Lady Dungannon in her journey from Llandshipping, Wales to Dublin to see "Lucasia" happily installed in Manor Rostrevor. Second, Philips had serious family business in Ireland. At the Restoration, her husband, a staunch supporter of Cromwell, had suffered significant financial losses. She hoped to salvage their resources by prosecuting a claim of her husband's to certain properties in Ireland. These legal and civil negotiations extended her visit to well over a year (to her delight). Yet, a third reason for the Dublin visit was quite possibly Philips's developing professional yearnings. Her literary apprenticeship was in Wales, in the 1640s and '50s; by the time of the Restoration in 1660, she was understandably eager to test her potential in a literary climate less competitive than London's and more hospitable certainly to untitled newcomers.

During Philips's stay in Dublin, it was Roger Boyle (familiarly "Orrery") who came forward as her patron. Orrery, an influential power in the Irish peerage and ten years Philips's senior, was the son of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, and a notable figure in Irish affairs, second only to Dublin's Lord Mayor, James Butler Duke Ormande. Like so many pivotal figures in Philips's career, Orrery had close ties to many of Philips's new Welsh relatives. As she wrote in August 1663: "My good friend ["Lucasia"] has favor'd me with the Acquaintance of my Lord Orrery: He is indeed a Man of Parts." And so he was. Hardly the frivolous man Bishop Burnet thought him to be, Orrery was a man of broad talent and achievement, as soldier, statesman, poet, French translator, and dramatist. William Smith Clark, the principal editor of Orrery's work and a leading scholar of the early Irish theater, identified Orrery as Restoration Dublin's most important literary figure and a generous patron of several minor writers, including Philips.

Orrery's literary credits show that he and Philips enjoyed intersecting interests. Like Philips, Orrery was an enthusiast in French literature, platonic friendship, and rhymed heroic drama, particularly tragedy, in which he preceded Dryden and Dryden's brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard. Clark suggests that "the always vain Orrery" promoted Katherine Philips's work in heroic tragedy to aggrandize his own success in the genre. Regardless, by the time Orrery had "discovered" Philips, he had established himself as a literary lion, principally through an early work, Parthenissa, a six-volume French romance he produced during the Interregnum. When he met Philips, Orrery was at work on his most successful play, The General, a heroic tragedy which premièred at John Ogilby's new Theatre Royal in Smock Alley, Dublin, in February 1663 and later in London at Lincoln's Inn Fields in September 1664. The vogue ushered in by Orrery's General may have steered Philips in the direction of heroic tragedy. When she writes in her letters that a fragment of her first Corneille translation just happened to find its way into Orrery's hands, we have to smile.

Orrery's interest in the untitled housewife from Wales was not fortuitous. As a former peer of Cromwell's, Orrery certainly knew Welsh Parliamentarians, a group that included Katherine Philips's husband and others of the larger Phillipps clan (though many Welsh Phillippses were royalists and members of The Society of Sea-Serjeants, a secret Stuart conclave flourishing in southwest Wales after the disgrace of 1649. In her poem "To the Countess of Roscommon, with a Copy of Pompey," Philips coyly states that it was not personal ambition but Orrery's prodding that led her to translate Corneille:

But when you wonder at my bold design,
Remember who did that high Task enjoin;
Th' Illustrious Orrery, whose least Command,
You would more wonder if I could withstand.

But Orrery in Dublin had a companion Philips-booster in London, Sir Charles Cotterell. This man, whom Philips affectionately called her "Poliarchus," figured just as prominently in her career as did Orrery. Cotterell was more than Philips's correspondent and confidant: he was her literary editor and royal agent. A Master of Ceremonies at the courts of both Charles I and Charles II, Cotterell was a loyal Stuart, expert diplomat, and seasoned specialist in royal protocol. When the time was most propitious, it was Cotterell who brought Katherine Philips's success in Dublin to the attention of the English court and its prestigious literary circles. Moreover, as a cousin of Sir Thomas Phillipps's sister, Cotterell was related by marriage to Katherine Philips's Welsh relatives. Philips probably consolidated her familial links to Cotterell in London at the Restoration, which she attended and celebrated in several panegyrics to the Stuarts.

Katherine Philips's ambitious decision to render a strict couplet-by-couplet translation of Corneille's heroic tragedy Pompée, and later his Horace, was correct, both for Philips and for the historical moment. No fledgling in French translation, Philips was more than up to the task. In addition to her work in Corneille, she had translated his paraphrase of Thomas à Kempis's Imitations, Madeleine de Scudéry's pastoral Almahide, and St. Amant's La Solitude. Philips's facility in French literature was publicly acknowledged by John Davies of Kidwelly, a Welsh contemporary, who dedicated to Philips a section of his translation of La Calprende's romance Cleopatra (1659–68). Philips also was familiar with the mannered verse of the précieuses and with the élégies of Henrietta Coligny de la Suze. The Ramboüillet circle, it should be noted, included Pierre Corneille, who figured so largely in Philips's dramatic career.

But Philips's attraction to Corneille was more than literary good sense, it was commercially savvy. As a native Londoner with strong literary leanings and influential relatives, foremostly Dryden and Cotterell, Philips naturally kept abreast of literary markets. In her Cardigan-Dublin-London letters, she frequently presses correspondents for information on theatrical vogues. In 1660, when Charles II opened the theaters, which had been legally closed by Parliament since 1642, the climate was indeed overripe for a high-spirited, full-blooded drama. Such was the temper of the times. Philips correctly anticipated that the heroic plays of Corneille, with their oversize tragic heroes, melodramatic plots, lofty ethical arguments, and exotic effects, had exactly what Restoration playgoers wanted. In fact, it is likely that Philips's success in Corneille pointed the way for a run in rhymed heroic drama, especially tragedy, which was rapidly being produced by her contemporaries Orrery, Howard, Dryden, Lee and Otway. Philips's success in Dublin and within months in London brought much attention to French heroic drama by ushering in a Corneille fad throughout the 1660s. This vogue surely gave the lie to Dryden's claim in 1668 that French drama did not have an audience in the English-speaking world. With the necessary hindsight, it was left for Pope in the 1730s to mark the value of French heroic drama in the English plays of the preceding age:

Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
When the tir'd nation breath'd from civil war.
Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire
Show'd us that France had something to admire.

Fortunately for literary historians and Philips scholars, a running account of Philips's Pompey is available in her 1662–63 letters from Dublin to Sir Charles Cotterell in London. With precision of detail, Philips discusses with "Poliarchus" her progress on the translation, its revisions, subsequent production, and its publication by John Crooke, the King's Printer in Ireland. But Philips's Pompey letters are equally important for what they reveal about the politics of female authorship and about Philips herself. We notice, for example, the significant literary and material support she received from male allies in the actual translation and mounting of the play; and we also observe in her letters the emergence of a strong authorial ego in this most "modest" of English women writers.

First, let us acknowledge Philips's wide network of male allies in the Pompey project. As she informs Cotterell, her plans for a Corneille translation began only casually, with a translation of a single scene in act 2. The translation was done in Dublin, and circulated (most strategically, one expects) among Philips's new Irish friends—the Butlers, Dungannons, Ogilbys, Roscommons, Temples, and Tyrells. Amusingly, Philips admits to Cotterell:

By some Accident or another, my Scene of Pompey fell into his [Orrery's] hands and he was pleas'd to like it so well, that he sent me the French Original; and the next time I saw him, [he] so earnestly importion'd me to pursue that translation that to avoid the Shame of seeing him who had so lately commanded a Kingdom, become a Petitioner to me for such a Trifle, I obey'd him so far as to finish the Act in which that Scene is; so that the whole Third Act is now English.

So impressed was Orrery with Philips's ability to translate Corneille's French alexandrines into neat English heroic couplets that he encouraged her to complete the remaining four acts. He judiciously postponed any premature mention of a stage production and subsequent publication. Again Philips wrote to Cotterell: "[Orrery] enjoin'd me to go on; and not only so, but brib'd me to be contented with the Pains, by sending me an excellent copy of Verses." Orrery's eighty-two-line encomium to Philips, published in her posthumous Poems (1667), was the final gesture that spurred Philips to complete the translation. Thus Orrery's compliment to Philips:

Within just two months, Orrery had what he wanted of Philips: an entirely producible, faithfully-translated heroic tragedy, written by an attractive young English talent with prestigious social and literary connections. His extravagant tribute to Philips was necessary due to her ostensible reticence at the outset of her career. (Brashear would say "feigned" reticence, and she may be correct.) But time was of the essence. Both Orrery and Philips knew that a rival translation of Corneille's play was in progress in London by a competing network, headed up by Sir Edmund Waller with collaborators Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Edward Filmore, Sir Charles Sackville, and Sir Sidney Godolphin. This new urgency attending Philips's translation—from Orrery's first encouragements down to the revisions and last-minute staging details—is dramatically laid out in her correspondence.

A flurry of letters passes between Philips in Dublin and Cotterell in London during the fall and winter of 1662–63. Philips, eager to precede the "Persons of Honour" translation, presses Cotterell to respond to her revisions and to add corrections of his own. They quibble over fine points of grammar and phrasing, the play's interact songs, and the appropriateness of the play's prose dedication to Anne Duchess of York. Philips's letters also document her reliance on Sir Edward Dering (the "Silvander" of her poems), a loyal English friend and the husband of Mary Harvey, one of Philips's former classmates at Hackney. Like Cotterell and Orrery, Dering was more than an influential politician: he was a consummate man of letters, member of the Duke of Ormande's Dublin circle, and, as his diaries show, an avid playgoer. After Orrery persuaded Philips to a Dublin production of her play in Ogilby's new Theatre Royal in Smock Alley (a real playhouse, finer than D'Avenant's theater in London, which, after all, was only a remodelled tennis court), Dering contributed to the project by writing the play's epilogue. The prologue was written by another literary lion, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, an established authority on dramatic translation (Essay on Translated Verse, 1684). Roscommon's participation in the Pompey project was important, as it gave a literary cachet to Philips's translation.

Orrery's role in the project was formidable. Not only did he initially encourage the project, he also financed it. Acting in effect as Philips's producer, Orrery put up £100 to cover the production's elaborate Roman and Egyptian costumes; he probably paid for the scenery, as well. Operatic in presentation, Philips's Pompey was performed and staged in the latest heroic mode, with a good deal of special effects. Orrery, drawing upon impressive resources, did everything to ensure a resplendent production. He even engaged the services of his own French composer to score the play's music. Also assisting with the music were Sir Peter Pett, John Ogilby, the unidentified "Philaster" (Colonel Jeffries of Abercynrig?), and Le Grand (the Duchess of Ormande's personal French composer).

And, so, on Tuesday evening, 10 February 1663, with Joseph Ashbury, a professional actor and theater-manager in the title role, Katherine Philips's Pompey premièred in Dublin's newest playhouse. Sumptuously mounted, it was a historic production and it pulled in a celebrity audience. Moreover, attendance at matinee performances proved that Philips's translation was also good family entertainment, a rare thing in the Restoration theatre. Not only did her Pompey beat Waller's team to the boards by almost an entire year, it also succeeded as a popular favorite for some fifteen years after its début. Its latest recorded London production was at the Duke of York's theater in 1678. Efforts by jealous contemporaries to undermine Philips's success, such as D'Avenant's burlesque of the play in act 5 of his Play-house To Be Lett (1663), were obviously fruitless. Philips's Pompey was widely praised, especially by female playgoers and writers, such as Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea, also a distant relation of the larger Phillipps group, who acknowledged Philips's achievement in two blankverse plays of her own.

As fame often has it, Philips became a celebrity in a single evening. It must have been the grandest night of her life. But even with her facility in French translation and her instinctive flair for stage-production, Philips's extravaganza could never have been mounted without the backing of the old boys' network. The stunning success of the English Pompey was attributable to many factors well beyond Katherine Philips's talent. The play was not a first-rate dramatic translation because Philips herself was not a first-rate poet; but the play succeeded quite nicely nonetheless because it was a lavish stage production in the contemporary heroic mode and because it effectively conveyed the high spirit of its original. It also was the first English-language rhymed heroic tragedy produced in the history of the Anglo-Irish theater. And if all of this wasn't novel enough, it was the product of a female pen.

Throughout the several weeks of intensive editorial revision and negotiation preceding Pompey's première, a less obvious aspect of the project begins to emerge with increasing force: the rising authorial ego of Katherine Philips. Biographical notices on Philips have traditionally identified her along the lines of the literary persona she and her coterie carefully constructed. In such English literary surveys as Aubrey's Lives (1898), Edward Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum (1675) (the first such survey to include a dedicated section on women poets), George Ballard's Memoirs (1752), Louisa Stuart Costello's Eminent Englishwomen (1844), Sir Edmund Gosse's Seventeenth-century Studies (1883), and George Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (1905), Katherine Philips is consistently presented as "the Matchless Orinda," a modest writer of chaste lines. Only Gosse perceived that she was "full of literary ambition." Philips's interest in fame and her strong desire to closely monitor the printing of her work are almost never mentioned by literary chroniclers. In fact, it would appear to be an amusing blunder of literary history that Philips's "sharp Fit of Sickness" over a so-called pirated edition of her poems printed in Fleet Street by Richard Marriot on 25 November 1663, long construed by "Orinda" devotées as hard evidence of her modesty and authorial reticence, was more likely an acute anxiety attack, resulting from Philips's frustration at not being able to control the printing of the first public appearance of her work. Quite understandably we find Philips in her letter of 29 January 1664 in a state of high pique. As she writes to Cotterell from Cardigan, Philips attempted to suppress Marriot's "false Edition." In fact, her dilemma was the talk of the town (Intelligencer, 18 January 1664). She complains that Marriot's unauthorized "false Book" is based on "false Copies" of her poems and "bad Verses." His is a "villainous Impression," flawed by production errors ("abominably printed"). Marriot's greatest sin was the inclusion of verses which were not hers. As Paul Elmen points out, some of Henry More's poems were included in this surreptitious edition. Philips had good reason to become ill, but not for the reason usually given.

Philips's public self-presentation is that of her persona "Orinda," the shy, self-effacing literary personality behind such lines as "[I] never writ any line in my life with an intention to have it printed…. I am so little concerned for the reputation of writing [and] I am so far from expecting applause for anything I scribble." This is the same voice which routinely evaluates her own work as mere "rags of Paper." The pose of modest amateur was supported by Philips's male backers. The anonymous author of the preface to the first authorized edition of Philips's collected work in 1667, probably Cotterell, mentions "how little she desired the fame of being in Print… how much she was troubled to be exposed." But as Philips's Letters reveal, the woman behind the "Orinda" mask was a wholly different individual. We sometimes see the mask slip in the Pompey letters to Cotterell when Philips discloses a sincere interest in fame and when she even boldly positions herself superior to her celebrated contemporaries. Philips's recorded thoughts during the Pompey project give us a wholly different reading on her as compared to the traditional Philips hagiography. The Letters reveal an aggressive new talent who is very much on the climb. Philips is strident, imposing, sometimes an out-and-out scold. She must surpass Waller's rival translation, Philips insists to Cotterell. She must present a corrected, bound manuscript copy of Pompey to the Duchess of York before Waller's Pompeius is printed. Cotterell must act as her agent at the English court. "The other translation," she fairly wails to Cotterell on 23 December 1662, "done by so many eminent Hands, will otherwise appear first, and throw this [her Pompey] into everlasting Obscurity" emphasis added). This statement, above all others, along with similar sentiments in subsequent letters to Cotterell of 27 December 1662 and later, are striking revelations because they bring into focus the authentic artistic personality of "the Matchless Orinda." Under the tensions and accelerated pace of the Pompey race against Waller's team, Philips's pride of authorship and explicit desire for fame had finally been articulated.

Evidence of Philip's developing egotism throughout the project also exists in her need to make literary decisions independent of Cotterell and Orrery. In the matter of the play's Dedication to Anne Duchess of York, Philips chooses prose over verse. With an unconcealed eye to her (anticipated) readership, she confidently justifies her decision to Cotterell: "Believe me, Poliarchus, I write the Letter [of Dedication] to the Duchess in Prose, neither out of Laziness or Disrespect, but merely because I thought it would have looked more pedantik and affected to have address'd myself to her in Verse…. I thought Prose would savour less of Ostentation." Then there is the matter of the songs in Pompey. Philips wrote the lyrics for five new inter-act songs; she also contributed to the play's incidental tunes, dances, and the grand masque in act 5. Her musical additions to Corneille's text illustrate both original participation in the project and musical talent. The first song, "Since Affairs of the State," was a popular hit about town, and later included in Choice Ayres (1675), a successful collection of contemporary songs compiled by John Playford, a leading London music publisher. Philips cleverly brings attention to her song in a poetic tribute to Elizabeth Boyle of the distinguished Cork family and later wife of Nicholas Tufton, Earl of Thanet, in a poem entitled "To my Lady Elizabeth Boyle, Singing now affairs &c." and in these lines to Cotterell of 10 January 1663: "I was so puff'd up with the Honour of [the dutchess of York's] Protection, that I have ventur'd to lengthen the Play by adding Songs in the Intervals of each Act, which they flatter me here are not amiss…. Philaster has already set one of them agreeably, and [an] abundance of People are learning it." As one critic persuasively demonstrates, Philips's five inter-act songs were quite unlike the purely transitional tunes in most English drama up to that time. Hers were integrally linked to the action in Pompey, and they also commented on the play's political intricacies, thereby assisting playgoers' interpretation of the play.

Philips's rising ego is never more apparent than when she takes on the competition. The Pompeius of Waller and his team—many senior literary men who surely would have regarded the ruddy-faced housewife from Wales an amusing interloper—was thought to be unfaithful to Corneille, according to Philips. Her criticism of the rival translation is severe, even condescending. In a letter to Cotterell of 17 September 1663, she is harsh: "There is room in several places for an ordinary Critick to shew his Skill. But I cannot but be surprised at the great Liberty they have taken in adding, omitting, and altering the Original as they please themselves: This I take to be a Liberty not pardonable in Translators, and unbecoming the Modesty of the Attempt." She also complains that the Waller team has "garbl'd" Corneille's text. In assuming "so great a License," the Waller translation is a weak imitation of the original, she judges; and it is marred, moreover, by "bad" rhymes. "But what chiefly disgusts me," Philips goes on, "is that the Sence most commonly languishes…. I really think the best of their lines equal to the worst in my translation."

When Katherine Philips left Dublin in mid-June 1663 to return to the isolation of Cardigan, Wales, little did she know that her career was essentially over. Never again would she hear the applause of her contemporaries or work with Orrery and Cotterell on a new play. Philips's aspirations for a second success equal to if not surpassing her Pompey were dashed by circumstance. Her timing, as always, was perfect; she simply was unlucky.

The last year of Philips's life was sheer anticlimax compared to the gay round of her Dublin visit. Not that Philips's enthusiasm had waned any. If anything, she returned to Cardigan heady with celebrity. Now back on Welsh soil she wasted little time parlaying her maiden success into a second theatrical vehicle. With the success of Pompey. Philips became discernibly different from the imposing personality of the Cotterell letters. Evidently validated by the acclaim of 1663, her post-Pompey correspondence gives us a relaxed, voide. At this stage in her career, Philips had become a self-conscious, professional writer with a product to sell, a commercial market to cultivate, and a reputation to maintain and aggrandize. Unlike her Tudor female predecessors, who circulated their writings in private, Katherine Philips was now a published author and a celebrity. By 1663, she had a public to please, and she was eager to delight again.

Philips peaked very early in her career, and she was keen to build on her notoriety. Moving rapidly, she wisely solidified her position by (safety) continuing with material she could manage. Again, she turned to her French master Corneille and selected his Horace, a heroic tragedy of early Rome, Like his Pompée, Corneille's Horace carried strong nationalistic applications for Restoration playgoers. The existence of an earlier English translation by Sir William Lower (Horatius, 1656), did not temper her zeal any more than Waller's competing translation of Corneille's Pompée daunted her progress in 1662–63. Philips writes Cotterell on 8 January 1664 that she has begun a second Corneillean translation. This time, she requires no direction from Dublin and London allies. Like her Pompey, Philips's Horace was intended to be a lavish spectacle; and what is more Philips evidently was planning a London prèmiere of Horace under her own personal direction. A seasoned tactician by this time, Philips enlisted Cotterell in London and "Lucasia" and Elizabeth Boyle in Dublin to help her arrange a trip to London, where she would stay with her brother-in-law Hector Philips. Ostensibly, Philips had to make the trip to help negotiate a civil post in London for her husband. But what a fine opportunity, she must have thought, to be back on native English soil, in the city of my birth, and there put forward my new play!

But only three months into the visit, Philips contracted the fatal smallpox, then at near-epidemic levels. The most celebrated English woman writer of the seventeenth century died quietly and unremarkably in a house in Fleet Street on 22 June 1664, attended in her final hours by her dear "Rosania" (Mary Aubrey). Philips was not quite thirty-three years old. She was buried in the churchyard of St. Benet-Sherehog, at the end of Syth's Lane in London, alongside the graves of her infant son Hector, her father John Fowler, and two grandparents. Ironically, several months before her own death, Philips had composed an elegy on the death of Lord Rich, heir of the Earl of Warwick, who had died of smallpox that same year. In lines presaging her own untimely death, the poem begins, "Have not so many lives of late / suffic'd to quench the greedy thirst of Fate?"

Philips's Horace was produced posthumously at London's Theatre Royal during the 1668–69 Season, based on the four acts Philips completed before her death (her work on the play ended with act 4, scene 6) and the remaining translation done by Sir John Denham (scene 7 of act 4 and all of act 5). The Duke of Monmouth, whose manuscript notebook, taken from him after Sedgemoor, included lines from Philips's verses, delivered the play's prologue. It included high praise for its deceased author:

So soft, that to our Shame we understand
They could not fall but from a Ladies hand.
Thus while a Woman HORACE did translate,
HORACE did rise above the Roman fate.

Philips's Horace was a favorite at the court of Charles II. It saw an amateur court production on 4 February 1668 with Barbara Villiers, Charles's most rapacious mistress, in a leading role (she borrowed the Crown jewels from the Tower of London just for the occasion). The four acts of Philips's Horace were first published in London in 1667 by Henry Herringman. The complete translation, with Denham's contribution, appeared in a subsequent publication by Herringman in 1669, under the title Horace. A Tragedy. Translated from Monsieur Corneille. The Fifth Act translated by Sir John Denham. Interestingly, Jacob Tonson selected Charles Cotton's translation of act 5 (1671) over Denham's in his (Tonson's) edition of Philips's work in 1710.

It is regrettable that Philips did not live to complete Horace, as she never would have authorized the produc tion it received in London. Like her Pompey, Horace was operatic; but its exotic effects and overall intent were severely compromised. Samuel Pepys, an informed theater enthusiast, attended a production of the play on 19 January 1669, and judged it a low "silly Tragedy." The play's entertainments (its songs, masques, incidental tunes) were not any of Philips's doing, but ill-advised additions by John Lacy, a professional English actor-playwright whose forte was not tragedy but comedy. The levity Lacy introduced into the play seriously muddled and unbalanced the play's tragic ethos. "Lacy hath made a farce of several dances." Pepys observed. "[I am] not much pleas'd with the play." Properly produced. Philips's Horace might have surpassed her first effort, had she lived to see the play through production. It certainly outdistanced Pompey as a translation. By 1664, Philips had become a confident translator, and Corneille an old friend. Her Horace was far less literal and strenuous a translation than Pompey since Philips's original procedure (strict line-for-line translation) is not as apparent in the second play. But instead of being the culmination of her work during the 1660s, Philip's Horace was merely an entertainment for the court and, moreover, a surprising embarrassment to serious playgoers.

Philips's sudden death at the height of her celebrity was a devastating blow to the literary community. But before long, the "Orinda" machine was in full swing. First came Herringman's edition of Philips's work in 1667, a tall handsome folio graced with an engraved frontispiece portrait by William Faithorne of the Vander Gucht portrait-bust of Philips. This first authorized edition of her collected work, reissued by Herringman in 1669 and in 1678, and by Tonson in 1710, was initiated by Sir Charles Cotterell, Philips's literary executor. It consisted of an anonymous preface (probably by Cotterell); commendatory verses by Abraham Cowley, Thomas Flatman, Cotterell, a pseudonymous Irish-woman poet "Philo-Phillipa" (Elizabeth Boyle?), Roscommon, and James Tyrell; 116 original poems and five verse-translations; and the two Corneille translations. Then, Philips's letters to Cotterell were gathered, selected, and certainly edited. Forty-eight were published in 1710 by Bernard Lintot (who may have obtained them through his son) under the title Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus. Philips's correspondence was reissued by Lintot, with one additional letter, in 1729. As the chronological gaps in the letters suggest, some of Philips's correspondence to Cotterell have either been lost or surpressed.

Curiously, Philips scholars have yet to raise a most obvious question: had Philips lived to full creative maturity, what direction might her work have taken? Two contemporaries close to the "Orinda" myth, namely Cotterell and "Philo-Phillipa," provide clues that allow us to envision Philips in her later years as an author of serious cultural engagement. First, Cotterell (if, in fact, the author of the preface to Philips's collected work) discloses important information about a body of "lost" work by Philips, being many "excellent discourses … on several subjects." He has seen these essays, and he reports that they would comprise a volume much larger than Philips's published folio of 1667, 124 pages. Perhaps today's recovery work in feminist studies will locate some of Philips's "lost" essays. Certainly they would be valuable to the history of English feminism, as Philips's essays preceded the published essays of such important turn-of-the-century feminist writers as Bathsua Makin (Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, 1673), Mary Astell (A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 1694), and Mary Lady Chudleigh (Essays upon Several Subjects, 1710). Furthermore, given Philips's life and times, her prose writings may offer fresh perspectives on French literature, dramatic translation, and the turbulent political setting of the day. As one who lived through three administrations, Philips may have recorded in these "lost" pieces some important topical information.

The elusive "Philo-Phillipa," clearly a female Irish intimate of Philips's (possibly, a Boyle), gives us further insight into Philips's projected literary maturity. In her rousing tribute to Philips, "Philo" expresses the hope that one day Philips will discover her own voice, and then produce original not translated material:

But if your fetter'd Muse thus praised be,
What great Things do you write when it is free?
When it is free to chuse both sence and words,
Or any subject the vast World affords?

Had her Horace received the success it deserved, Katherine Philips would have had two major theatrical successes to her credit. Surely she would have gone on to produce original drama of her own in the mid-1660s. And it is entirely likely that she would have become involved in feminist issues, especially in light of the rise of feminist drama by Behn and her lesser contemporaries "Ephelia," Polwhele, Boothby, and "Ariadne." While it is true that Philips never displayed overt feminist leanings, the woman was ambitious. Understandably, she would have moved her career forward along commercially attractive lines.

At full maturity, an impressive Katherine Philips steps forward. Even as a young, underdeveloped writer of slight life experience and cloying sentimentality, Philips succeeded in becoming the most celebrated English woman writer of the seventeenth century. Had she lived through the 1670s and '80s, Philips might have been as versatile as Behn. Writing Katherine Philips into her future is to observe a career of remarkable development: the adolescent bagatelle of Cardigan and the early friendship lyrics; the dramatic translations from Corneille; the prose-essays Cotterell mentions; and, then, perhaps a historical chronicle, some original drama, even some feminist writings. Philips at full maturity emerges as a significant, eclectic talent in an exuberant age of English literature. Had she grown to a plane of relative artistic independence (Behn's achievement), Katherine Philips could have put aside the "Orinda" myth and the old boys' network that welded and promoted it as mere theatrical props of her past.