Poet and painter of pastoral and antipastoral scenes Though a member of a family well connected to court circles from early Tudor times until the end of the seventeenth century, few particulars are known about Anne Killigrew. Born in London, daughter of Dr. Henry Killigrew who became chaplain to James II and master of the Savoy (hospital), she became one of Mary of Modena’s maids of honor. Mary, the wife of James, brother of Charles II, cultivated a literary culture at court, encouraging her attendants to write, paint, and participate in masques. Kil-ligrew excelled in poetry and painting, the twin talents extolled extravagantly by John Dryden in the ode he wrote to accompany the collection of her poems compiled for publication shortly after her death to smallpox. The detailed descriptions of landscape in her poetry, dotted with classical ruins and gloomy groves, receive literal visualization in her paintings, providing symbolic backdrops for her court portraits. In her poems, including occasional and pastoral verses, as well as three additional works probably from her pen, Killigrew claims a literary and moral kinship with Orinda (Katherine Philips, the royalist poet and translator who became her inspiration), a connection drawn also by Dryden because of the similarity of their deaths.
Although Killigrew did not herself experience the violence of the civil wars and royal execution or turmoil of the interregnum, her poetry registers a keen disapproval of warlike behavior. Like her predecessor Philips, Killi-grew’s rejection of a turbulent male world of military action and political upheaval leads her into an alternative literary world of a primarily female pastoral community, but unlike Philips,
Killigrew’s pastoral settings are not idealized moral retreats where platonic friendship provides a soothing antidote to economic and political distress. Death appears to be the only real retreat. Killigrew’s pastoral dialogues and complaints are set in infernal and distinctly antipastoral landscapes, although they also appeal to virtue and reason to restore harmony. Her earliest poem in the collection is an epic fragment celebrating Alexander the Great, but her second poem rejects the heroic genre in favor of a lyrical voice singing the praises of heavenly beauty embodied in a strong female figure, the good and gracious queen. Her shift from praising a military male model to a female model of inward virtue becomes a thematic focus for many of her poems. In several pastoral poems, Killigrew alludes to classical myth and scripture in her expressions of concern for female chastity in the face of male inconstancy, in one case voicing Penelope’s fear of Ulysses’ faithlessness. Having the authorship of some of her poems questioned, Killigrew responded in verse to defend her integrity, voicing the difficulties faced by ambitious women writers.
Nancy Hayes
See also Anguissola, Sofonisba; Art and Women; Inglis, Esther; Literary Culture and Women.
Bibliography
Primary Work
Killigrew, Anne. Poems. Introduction by Richard Morton. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967.
Secondary Works
Barash, Carol. English Women’s Poetry, 1649—1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Williamson, Marilyn. Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650—1750. Detroit, MI:
Wayne State University Press, 1990.
World History
