SOURCE: Limbert, Claudia. “Two Poems and a Prose Receipt: The Unpublished Juvenalia of Katherine Philips.” English Literary Renaissance 16, no. 2 (spring 1986): 383-90.

In the following essay, Limbert describes a manuscript purported to be the earliest examples of Philips's poetry.

In his brief biography of the Royalist poet Katherine Philips (1632-1664), known in her time as “The Matchless Orinda,” John Aubrey (the cousin of Philips' lifelong friend and schoolmate, Mary Aubrey Montague) claims that, having been influenced as a small child by her grandmother Oxenbridge's interest in writing poetry, Katherine Philips had “Loved poetry at schoole, and made verses there.”¹ While no poetry from these early school years seems to have survived, a hitherto unpublished manuscript in the uncatalogued Orielton Collection of the National Library of Wales² reveals Philips as a practicing poet, possibly as early as her fourteenth year.

The daughter of a prominent London merchant, John Fowler,³ Philips...