ABSTRACT
With him Philips had two children. Her son died in infancy but her daughter survived Philips’s early death from smallpox. Philips is known predominantly as a poet. Her earliest poems were prefixed to the poems of Henry Vaughan (1651). A well-educated woman who knew several languages Philips translated Corneille’s Pompée, which was performed in Dublin in 1663 to great acclaim. She also translated Horace, which, however, remained uncompleted at the time of her death. Her own collected poems appeared first in an unauthorized version in the year of her death, 1664, and then in an authorized one in 1667. These poems established her as a poet who used the conventional language of courtship to describe relationships between women. Philips had a ‘Society of Friendship’, a correspondence circle that was active for about ten years between 1651 and 1661. In this society members adopted classical names. The society appears to have included Mary Aubrey (or ‘Rosania’) and Anne Owen (also known as ‘Lucasia’). Philips’s poems suggest that she was what one might now term a woman-identified woman. Known as the ‘matchless Orinda’ in her female friendship circles many of her poems were addressed to ‘Lucasia’, with whom she seems to have had a ten-year relationship between 1652 and 1662.
