SOURCE: Andreadis, Harriette. “The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 1 (autumn 1989): 34-60.

In the following essay, Andreadis traces Philips's conscious use of male Platonic friendships as a model for her homoerotic poetry about friendships between women.

Katherine Philips, known as “The Matchless Orinda,” was the first English female poet to achieve a considerable reputation in her own time. She was extravagantly praised, indeed lionized, by her male contemporaries: Abraham Cowley, the earl of Roscommon (Wentworth Dillon), Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden, and much later, even John Keats referred to her as the female standard of excellence toward which all other women ought to aspire.¹ Andrew Marvell may have been influenced by some of her poetic language and Henry Lawes set a number of her poems to music.² Laudatory references continue into the eighteenth century, particularly by women writers who, responding to...