The Matchless Orinda and the Imprint of Virtue: Locating Katherine Philips’ Literary Authority in the 1667 Folio Edition of Her Work

Within a few years following the death of Katherine Philips in 1664, a formalized public representation of her poetic legacy appeared in the form of a folio edition of her work published in 1667. This edition, published by Henry Herringman, was titled Poems By the most deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips The Matchless Orinda. To which is added, Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey and Horace, Tragedies. With several other Translations out of French. It contained as the frontispiece an engraved image of Philips classically rendered as a bust on a pedestal, followed by an unsigned preface, seven commendatory poems, 117 of her poems, and her translations, as the title indicates. Unlike an earlier “pirated” collection of her poems from 1664, this posthumous folio edition was, as Margaret Ezell describes, a “memorial marker,” a “relique,” or “monument” to the deceased (“Posthumous” 127). Such posthumous editions were not uncommon, and an authorized collection of Philips’ work was already on the horizon before her death;¹ nonetheless, this edition of her work is a critical component in the formation of her posthumous persona as well as in the subsequent representations of Philips as a woman writer. In contrast to the relatively few publications of her work before her death, this 1667 folio emerged as a textual and visual representation of Philips’ name, image and reputation—a material artifact of a woman writer.² The folio’s editorial apparatus—the frontispiece, the preface, and the commendatory poems—managed to appease the cultural anxiety over a published female poet by yoking her gender with her unrivaled virtue, and in turn set a precedent for the emblematic nature of Philips, or rather The Matchless Orinda, as the idealized female poet and the location of seventeenth-century female literary authority.

The unsigned preface to the 1667 folio edition of Katherine Philips’ work sets a precedent for how the volume represents not only Philips as a writer and woman, but also the more general notion of female authorship.³ The preface employs such conventional rhetoric common to prefaces as a narrative of her resistance to publish, a justification of the edition as an important memorial marker honoring the legacy of the deceased author, and a typical editorial claim that the text is the most comprehensive and uncorrupted printing to date.⁴ According to Wendy Wall, in her book The Imprint of Gender, prefatory matter in printed texts served a complicated function:

Hundreds of prefaces were designed to perform the arduous task of explaining and justifying printed texts. Writers created a vast array of strategies that quickly became conventional: they withheld their names, claimed that the text was a youthful exercise, and emphasized their gentility. Such strategies had the effect of reinforcing the stigma of print even as they ostensibly sought to lessen its hold. Even those on the margins of the social world, would-be aristocrats, found it advantageous to mimic a disdain for print in order to indicate their ‘proper’ position. The most common means for the writer or printer to ease the text into the public eye was for him to suggest that publication did not have full authorial consent. This strategy of dissociating text and author created a skewed vision of printed texts; they seemed to be private words snatched away from their producers and offered for sale to the public. Discourse was written as private and secretive matter unveiled in a moment of transgression. Reading became figured as an act of trespass [emphasis added].

(173)

The preface to the 1667 edition of Philips makes these standard rhetorical moves, but it also constructs her persona in a way that both employs and re-inscribes the gendered, sexually charged representation of printed texts as well as the social stigma associated with such public exposure.⁵ While on the one hand, it employs the enticing allure of exposing private, aristocratic discourse to the voyeuristic reader, as Wall describes, on the other hand it simultaneously counters this sexually charged representation with Philips’ overwhelming female virtue. The impact is an erotically charged female...