Abstract

This article analyzes the conflation of authorship and friendship in the poetry and prose of Katherine Philips, a Restoration-era contemporary of John Milton and Margaret Cavendish. Philips scholarship has long concentrated on gender and sexual politics, but this essay argues that Philips's intense interest in her female friends (which has been read by feminist critics as a sign of early "lesbianism") is motivated not merely by sexual or platonic desire, but also by a desire to fashion the friend into a medium of her own poetic legacy. Drawing on recent scholarship on print and manuscript culture, seventeenth-century politics, and bibliography, I argue that Philips's imaginative conflation of authorship and friendship allows her to express a powerful vision of poetic authority and authorial prerogative.

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