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NOTES TO PP. 241–50
University Press, 1996, ch. 6. In justifying her own abrupt appearance in print,
Cavendish also seems to have had access to the censorious manuscript exchange
between Mary Wroth and Edward Denny because she aired part of it in the preface
“To All Noble, and Worthy Ladies” in Poems and Fancies. Details of the exchange
between Denny and Wroth can be found in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, pp. 31–5.
Roberts cites Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, 1664 as the source for this reference to
Wroth. My attention was drawn to the earlier uses of the quotation by James Fitzmaurice,
“Fancy and the Family: Self-characterizations of Margaret Cavendish,” HLQ 53
(1990):198–209.
41 The OED cites a number of uses of “extravagant” from the middle to the latter part
of the seventeenth century having to do with going beyond normal limits.
“Extravagant” was also a word apparently circling around Cavendish and Poems and
Fancies from the outset, as is made clear by Dorothy Osborne in her letter to her
future husband, William Temple: “Let mee aske you if you have seen a book of Poems
newly come out, made by my Lady New Castle. For god sake if you meet with it
send it mee[.] They say tis ten times more Extravagant then her dresse. Sure the
poore woman is a little distracted[.] She could never been soe rediculous else as to
venture at writeing book’s and in verse too.” See Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir
William Temple, ed. Kenneth Parker, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 75,
Letter 17. I have modernized the punctuation somewhat.
42 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–
1800, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 170.
43 Price, “Feminine Modes of Knowing and Scientific Enquiry: Margaret Cavendish’s
Poetry as Case Study,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox,
ch. 6.
44 See Williamson Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750, ch. 2,
“Orinda and Her Daughters.”
45 Quotations from Philips’s poetry are from The Collected Works of Katherine Philips,
The Matchless Orinda, vol. I, ed. Patrick Thomas, Brentford: Stump Cross Books,
1990. Volumes II and III print her letters and translations, respectively. The latter
are edited by G.Greer and R.Little.
46 The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, The Poems, p. 9. For the quotation from
Herrick’s “Gather Ye Rosebuds,” see The Letters, p. 60.
47 See, respectively, Elaine Hobby, “Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian
Poet” in What Lesbians Do in Books, ed. Elaine Hobby and Chris White, London: The
Women’s Press, 1991, p. 201, and Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic
Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, London: The
Women’s Press, 1985, p. 71; for a restatement of this position see Faderman, Chloe
Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present,
New York: Viking Penguin, 1994, pp. 3–6, 17–19. Faderman’s views with regard to
Philips are further questioned by Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British
Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801, London: Scarlet Press, 1993, pp. 111–12.
48 Hobby, “Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet,” p. 201.
49 Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in our Time, New
York: W.W.Norton, 1995, p. 216.
50 See Donoghue, Passion Between Women, pp. 19–20, and the possibility that
“lesbianism was unthinkable unless linked to other symptoms or concepts, such as
Spain, Roman Catholicism or witchcraft.” Marvell’s seemingly sexually active
cloister of nuns in “Upon Appleton House” helps to bolster this point. See also James
Holstun, “‘Will You Rent Our Ancient Love Asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne,
Marvell, and Milton,” ELH 54 (1987):835–67. Hobby, pp. 189–90, draws attention
to Cowley’s couplet in “On Orinda’s Poems” as an instance of “significant
contemporary anxiety” about equating Philips with Sappho: “They talk of Sappho,
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