Introduction: Female friendship, community and retreat Friendship still has been design‘d, The Support of Human-kind; The safe Delight, the useful Bliss, The next World‘s Happiness, and this. Give then, O indulgent Fate! Give a Friend in that Retreat (Tho‘ withdrawn from all the rest) Still a Clue, to reach my Breast. Let a Friend be still convey‘d Thro‘ those Windings, and that Shade! Where, may I remain secure, Waste, in humble Joys and pure, A Life, that can no Envy yield; Want of Affluence my Shield.1 Anne Finch’s “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat” is one of a number of verses by early modern women which engage with the poetic traditions of friendship and the pastoral.2 Finch employed the imagery and language of the pastoral to shape a convivial but protected space of retreat. The key to achieving the sanctity of such a space is virtuous friendship, which Finch implies is both enabled by and enabling of pastoral retirement. Finch’s retreat is not an absolute retirement; she calls for “a Friend in that Retreat / (Tho’ withdrawn from all the rest)” to share in the “humble Joys and pure” of the pastoral. Friendship is “design’d [as] the Support of Human-kind”, a divine gift to ease the burden of human reason and passion. The cause of “the next World’s Happiness, and this”, 1 Anne Finch, “The Petition for an Absolute Retreat” in Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions, printed for J.B. and sold by Benj. Tooke at the Middle-Temple-Gate, William Taylor in Pater-Noster-Row, and James Round (London, 1713), pp. 33-49, lines 192-205. 2 Like the other writers examined in this dissertation, Anne Finch has received increased scholarly and critical attention in recent decades. Relevant studies include Dorothy Mermin, ‘Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Phililps, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch’, ELH: Journal of English Literary History (57:2) 1990, 335- 55; Ann Messenger, Gender at Work: Four women writers of the eighteenth century (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990); Barbara McGovern, Anne Finch and her poetry: A critical biography (Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 1992); Charles H. Hinnant, The Poetry of Anne Finch: An essay in interpretation (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1994); Carol Barash, English Women‘s Poetry, 1649- 1714 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001); Jane Spencer, ‘Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720): Sorrow into Song’, Women and Poetry 1660-1750, ed. Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleworth (London: Palgrave, 2003), 60-70; Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing agency, inventing genre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Bronwen Price, ‘Verse, Voice and Body: The retirement mode and women‘s poetry 1680-1723’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12:3 (January 2007), 5.1-44. 1 Finch’s vision of friendship is spiritually elevated and because it is disembodied is able to transcend the boundaries of life and death. Finch’s verse illustrates the social and metaphysical themes which dominate the emerging early modern women’s literary tradition. Engaging with established poetic forms and subjects, women like Finch adapted inherently masculinist models of friendship and community which, set in the space of the pastoral, offered a vision of security and conviviality. In doing so, Finch participates in a model of female literary engagement largely initiated by Katherine Philips, better known in the period by her poetic pseudonym, ‘Orinda’. It is this evolving female poetic tradition which is the subject of this thesis.3 The full implications of the figure ‘Orinda‘, both for Philips’s career and for this tradition of women‘s writing, will be discussed in Chapter 1. Community and friendship are the cornerstones of this emerging female poetic tradition, and are themselves tightly connected. The verse and literary activity of the women of this thesis contribute to an evolving tradition of friendship with political and communal potential. Looking at the philosophical and material expressions of community in the writing of three early modern women, Katherine Philips, Jane Barker, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, I identify common ideological threads which contribute to a broad social philosophy of early modern community, as well as a model of early modern women’s literary and political engagement. All three women shape philosophies of friendship which are foundational to the formation of communities, both real and imagined, and which are based on the idea of shared virtue and political commitment. It is necessary within the course of this introduction to examine the concepts of community and friendship in their contemporary usages, showing how this may depart from our modern understanding of the terms. Early modern philosophy was heavily influenced by the revival of the classical writers and their definitions of the social world. Classical philosophies of friendship consider the relationship central to the construction of the polis, or the public body, and early modern philosophies of friendship likewise considered the relationship as 3 The influence of Philips, as ‘Orinda’, can be traced from contemporary commendatory poems as shown by Ellen Moody, to poems comparing later writers with Orinda, the pinnacle of female literary achievement. See Ellen Moody, ‘Orinda, Rosania, Lucasia et aliae: Towards a new edition of the works of Katherine Philips’, Philological Quarterly, 66 (1987), 325-54 (p. 327); Jeslyn Medoff, ‘The Daughters of Behn and the Problem of Reputation’, in Women, Writing, History: 1640-1740, ed. by Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 33-54; Kathryn King, Jane Barker, Exile: A literary career 1675-1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 45. 2 foundational to larger social bodies.4 Friendship was considered as separate from the official ties which bind the public body, such as marriage, familial obligations, and hierarchical governance. Same-sex friendship transcends the more material relationship between the sexes, and is therefore represented as a spiritual, disembodied union of souls. Through engagement with the discourse of friendship, a discourse inherited from classical writers and evolved in the Renaissance, the writers of this study position friendship as foundational to the building and sustaining of communities. The focus of this study is, broadly, communities: the ways in which they are individually and collectively imagined, their relationship to historical events and political ideology, and the material means of their textual representation. The seventeenth century was a time of political conflict, institutional upheaval, and, as a result, social experimentation. Textuality played a significant role in social cohesion, with the acts of both reading and writing providing intellectual and emotional bridges to connect individuals across time and space. This would become an important feature of the philosophy of friendship envisioned by seventeenth-century writers, as it offered a means of connecting individuals torn apart by the political conflict and social splintering of the Civil War. A close examination of the literary activity of women in the later seventeenth century reveals attitudes towards political conflict and change through a range of social imaginings and textual transmission. The women who comprise this study come from diverse backgrounds: Katherine Philips, a staunch royalist whose ‘Society of Friendship’ challenged assumptions about women’s political and literary engagement after the dissolution of the monarchical state5; 4 Early modern friendship philosophy looked to Aristotle‘s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato‘s Symposium, and Cicero‘s On Duties. See Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship (1580), trans. by M. A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 2004); Jeremy Taylor, A Discourse on the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship, with Rules of Conducting it. Written in Answer to a Letter from the Most Ingenious and Vertuous M.K.P. (1657); Francis Finch, Friendship (London, 1654). 5 Sarah Prescott, ‘”That private shade, wherein my Muse was bred”: Katherine Philips and the Poetic Spaces of Welsh Retirement’, Philological Quarterly, 88:4 (2009), 345-366; Sasha Roberts, ‘Women‘s Literary Capital in Early Modern England: Formal composition and rhetorical display in manuscript and print’, Women‘s Writing, 14:2 (2007), 246-269; Susannah B. Mintz, ‘Katherine Philips and the Space of Friendship’, Restoration, 22.2 (1998), 62-78; Bronwen Price, ‘”Spotless passion”: Public face and private space in the poetry of Katherine Philips, the ‘matchless Orinda’’, Poetry Wales 33.1 (1997), 44-49; Claudia A. Limbert, ‘”The unison of well-tun‘d hearts”: Katherine Philips‘ friendships with male writers’, English Language Notes 29:1 (1991), 25-37; Carol Barash, English Women‘s Poetry 1649-1724: Politics, community and linguistic authority (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Catharine Gray, ‘Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie’, English Literary Renaissance, 32:3 (2002), 426-451; Gray, ‘The Knowing Few: Katherine Philips and the Courtly Coterie’, chapter 3 of her Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th Century Britain, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105-142. 3 Jane Barker, a Catholic convert and devout Jacobite, whose poetry reflects the material and social conditions of exile and otherness post-16886; and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, a nonconformist poet whose provincial retreat shaped her vision of both friendship and the self.7 Philips - as represented by