Born in Ilchester, Somerset, eldest daughter of Elizabeth (Portnell) and Walter Singer, a dissenting preacher (who met when he was imprisoned for Nonconformity). Well educated; began writing verse at twelve; was patronized by the family of Henry Thynne of Longleat; first in print in 1693. In 1710 married Thomas Rowe, thirteen years her junior, who died of consumption in 1715; her elegy on his death inspired Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard. Later suppressed the erotic element in her verse, as she became more pious in her retirement in Frome; became a celebrated writer of uplifting prose, and of lifeless devotional verse. She seems not to have been a cheery old lady: when told that she looked well and should live long, she replied ‘that it was the same as telling a slave his fetters were like to be lasting, or complimenting him on the walls of his dungeon’.
Poems on Several Occasions. Written by Philomela (London, 1696); T. Rowe (ed.), The Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse of Mrs Elizabeth Singer (London, 1739); Henry F. Stecher, Elizabeth Singer Rowe: The Poetess of Frome. A Study in Eighteenth-Century English Pietism (Frankfurt: M. Peter Lang; Bern: Herbert Land, 1973).