THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN RETRACTED Katherine Philips's Politicised Coterie Writing

Abstract

Abstract This essay was runner‐up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Seventeenth Century Section. Private epistolary exchange took place as part of a more encompassing social exchange in the early modern period. For a royalist such as Katherine Philips, coterie exchange was a conscious means of creating and maintaining a sympathetic literary community based on common ideology. Philips's coterie production, spanning her socially isolated time in both Wales and Ireland, represents not only an attempt to further individual literary reputation, but as an enabling space from which to form a community of ideologically minded individuals. Such coterie production can be seen as a dynamic construction of a public space as an alternative site of power. Drawing from the Habermasian model of the literary public sphere and Hannah Arendt's notion of public space, I argue that the politicised coterie overturns the binaries of author/reader, manuscript/print, and public/private, offering strategies for royalist women writers to enter into a public discourse from within a ‘private’ production and circulation. Replacing the historical narratives of the political uprisings of the 1650s with narratives of heroism and friendship, Philips's coterie is not necessarily a retreat from a troubled social and political atmosphere, but a refiguring of the heroic and social traditions of Royalists from within a contemporary position of exile and isolation. Philips's poetry of female friendship is not only a response to the separation and loss of the Civil War, but an active construction of an alternative community based upon politicised friendship. Writing in a period of change and in the face of personal isolation, friendships based on literary exchange constituted an alternative society in which the participants imaginatively shed the differences which separate them in the larger, public world. Examining the coterie verse and epistolary writing of Katherine Philips in the context of an alternative political community reveals the need for renewed critical focus upon collectivities and alliances which shaped early modern women's writing.