Katherine Philips

Katherine Philips [née Fowler] (1632-64) was originally from London, but after her marriage to James Philips lived the rest of her life in Cardigan, Wales. She translated several plays from the French, including one by Corneille, but was primarily known for her poetry, much of which focused on the theme of friendship. She established a coterie of friends and each appeared via a pseudonym in the poems: Philips was ‘Orinda’, Anne Owen was ‘Lucasia’, and Mary Aubrey was ‘Rosania’. Some of her male friends were involved in the circle as well, such as Francis Finch (‘Palaemon’), Sir Edward Dering (‘Silvander’), and Sir Charles Cotterell (‘Poliarchus’).  An unauthorized edition of her Poems appeared in 1764, an enlarged authorized version appeared posthumously in 1667, and Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus in 1705. In many respects, the Steele/Scott/Attwater coterie of women poets in the West Country in the 1760s and ’70s, with their use of pastoral literary names, friendship poems and friendship books, and the passing of their manuscript poems among themselves, mirrors that of Philips and her friends a century earlier.  See Ballard, Memoirs, 287-96; Poems by Eminent Ladies, vol. 2,  215-34.