SOURCE: "Katherine Philips: Controlling a Life and Reputation," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 56, No. 2, May, 1991, pp. 27–42.

In the following essay, Limbert discusses Philips's efforts to assert control over aspects of her personal and public life. Limbert questions the validity and relevance of critical preoccupation with Philips's sexual identity and instead examines the socially acceptable methods by which she protected her literary reputation.

Katherine Philips (1632–64) was, in effect, two women. The first woman was the very conventional product of London's seventeenth-century merchant class, which was firmly Puritan-Presbyterian in religion and staunchly Parliamentarian in politics. Consistent with her family background as well as with her society's expectations for women, Philips received—at most—six years of a boarding school education, probably stressing accomplishments rather than academics. Her dowry mostly on paper and her looks unremarkable, she was nevertheless considered fortunate in her marriage, at the age of sixteen, to James...