ABSTRACT
Katherine Philips (nee Fowler) (1632-64) was particularly admired in the seventeenth century for her poems on friendship; in recent years those she addressed to women have been of great interest to feminist scholars, and there has been some debate over whether her expressions of love for women can be called lesbian, and whether the relationships presented in her writings were actual or 'merely' literary. She married in 1648, when she was 16; her husband, James, the MP for Cardiganshire, Wales, was 54. For a seventeenth-century couple, they had to wait an unusually long time before the birth of their first child. However, losing their baby in a matter of days was not an uncommon experience for parents at that time. The following is one of two pieces on the death of her son. It is obviously a deeply personal text, but apparently not intended to be a private one. For some readers, this, like the 'artificial' nature of the self-writing here, raises interesting questions about the 'truth' and even the integrity of what has been written.
