SOURCE: "The Matchless Orinda," in Seventeenth Century Studies: A Contribution to the History of English Poetry, William Heinemann, 1897, pp. 229–58.

A distinguished English literary historian, critic, and biographer, Gosse wrote extensively on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature. In the following excerpt, originally published in Cornhill Magazine in 1881, he seeks to revive interest in Philips's work and provides an overview of her career.

It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that women began to be considered competent to under-take literature as a profession.

In the crowded galaxy of Elizabethan and Jacobean poets there is no female star even of the seventh magnitude. But with the Restoration, the wives and daughters, who had learned during the years of exile to act in political and diplomatic intrigue with independence and skill, took upon themselves to write independently too, and the last forty years of the century are crowded...