Best known today for her poems on female friendship, Katherine Philips wrote some 125 poems on a variety of subjects; she translated plays by Pierre Corneille and five shorter Italian and French pieces; and she wrote a series of letters to Sir Charles Cotterell that were published after her death as Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (1705). Philips (whose non de plume was Orinda) was one of a relatively small number of British women writers whose poems were widely circulated in the 1650s and early 1660s, and she seemed to her contemporaries to be, as the title pages of the first two editions of her Poems declared, "the Incomparable" (1664) or "the Matchless Orinda" (1667).

The only daughter of Katherine and John Fowler, she was born in early January 1632 in the parish of Saint Mary Woolchurch Haw in London. There is no exact record of her birth, but the poem "On the...