Her father, Sir William Kingsmill, died before her birth, her mother Anne (Hazlewood) and stepfather, Sir Thomas Ogle, during her childhood; she survived, to become Maid of Honour to Mary of Modena, and marry, in 1684 (registering herself as ’spinster aged about 18 years’) Col. Heneage Finch, a Court officer: the marriage was childless but very happy. When James II was deposed they retired to the Kent country seat of the Earl of Winchilsea, to which title Finch expectedly succeeded in 1712. Lived a retired, country life; published her poems anonymously, praising the virtues of having ‘the skill to write, the modesty to hide’. In some respects a typical Augustan poet of society – she knew Pope and Gay (who mocked her in Three Hours after Marriage as Phoebe Clinket, ink-stained and with pens in her hair): conjugal life, women’s friendship, nature and retirement constituted major themes. Wordsworth made an anthology of her poetry.
Miscellany Poems On Several Occasions (London, 1713); Myra Reynolds (ed.), The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1903); Katharine N. Rogers, Six Eighteenth-Century Women Authors (NY: Frederick Ungar, 1979).