SOURCE: "Romantic Love—Poetry," in Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1649–88, 1988. Reprint by The University of Michigan Press, 1989, pp. 128–42.

In the following excerpt, Hobby analyzes Philips's public persona as a function of the constraints placed upon women writers in the seventeenth century and examines Philips's reworking of the conventions of courtly love poetry in her poems celebrating female friendship.

Katherine Philips, 'the Matchless Orinda', the author of a book of poetry, two play translations and some published correspondence, has long been perceived as a model lady poetess, dabbling in versification in a rural Welsh backwater, confining her attention solely to the proper feminine concerns of love and friendship. It is generally agreed that she was modestly alarmed at the prospect of any public attention for her work. By briefly examining her Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (her correspondence with the Master of Ceremonies at Charles II's court, Charles...