An Collins's Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653) represents one of the first significant religious publications by a woman. Her volume, composed of numerous religious songs and poetic meditations, reveals the difficulties that women had to overcome in order to publish and how they could employ religious writing to begin creating their own voice. In "The Preface" she tells the reader that some have objected to her effort: "Yet this cannot prevail to hinder me / From publishing those truths I do intend." Her work captures the beginnings of a feminine sensitivity expressed as a positive statement of the empowerment that her religious experiences and writing gave her.

The only biographical information available about Collins comes from her "To the Reader," "The Preface," "The Discourse," and other poems in Divine Songs and Meditacions, and any discussion of her life is necessarily speculative. In "To the Reader" she says that she has...