Dubbed by her admirers ‘The Matchless Orinda’, and usually compared favourably with Aphra Behn (‘The Incomparable Astraea’), if only on grounds of morality and professed modesty (though she knew ‘everybody’); ‘very good-natured; not at all high-minded; pretty fatt; not tall; red pumpled face; wrote out Verses in Innes, or Mottos in windowes, in her table-booke’, wrote Aubrey. The daughter of a successful London merchant, John Fowler, and his second wife, Katherine Oxenbridge, who herself remarried a Parliamentarian baronet, Sir Richard Philips, in 1646; in 1648 was married to James Philips, aged 54, a widower kinsman of her stepfather; bore two children. Despite her Puritan family, she had Royalist sympathies, and developed connections with Cavalier circles that after the Restoration, which ruined her husband, were (possibly literally) life-savers. Developed intense Platonic-romantic relationships with various young ladies, and a cult of friendship. Her translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée in 1663 made her reputation; four acts through translating his Horace she contracted small-pox, and died in London.
Poems, By the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, The Matchless Orinda (London, 1667); G. Saintsbury (ed.), The Caroline Poets, Vol.I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905); Philip Souers, The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge, Mass, 1931); Lillian Federman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (NY: William Morrow, 1981).