SOURCE: Brashear, Lucy. “The Forgotten Legacy of the ‘Matchless Orinda.’” Anglo-Welsh Review 65 (1979): 68-76.

In the following essay, Brashear documents how Philips's persona as a reluctantly published gentle-lady was contrived to ensure her own success but prohibited future British women from publishing poetry.

Virginia Woolf believed that women were “trained” to be novelists rather than poets. In A Room of One's Own she described the restricted background of the “common sitting-room” as the most important influence responsible for the training of women writers at the time of Jane Austen in observing and analysing character. While Woolf's theory clarifies the peculiar aptitude of eighteenth and nineteenth century women for the novel genre, it does not explain their reluctance to follow the example of Queen Elizabeth and other “learned ladies” of the English Renaissance, such as the Countess of Pembroke, who was admired as a patron of poets as well as...