When Sapphos Meet: Louise Imogen Guiney and Katherine Philips’ Selected Poems (1904)

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the once prominent, later neglected Boston Catholic literary scholar, poet and editor, Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920), editor of a “little volume” of Philips’ Selected Poems for the English publisher, editor and antiquary, J.R. Tutin. Although Saintsbury’s inclusion of Philips as the only woman in his 1905 edition of Minor Poets of the Caroline Period for the Clarendon Press was undoubtedly an important juncture in the history of Philips’ reception, I argue that Guiney’s Selected points the way forward to the surge of recent interest in Philips from queer and feminist perspectives, both following and diverging from the critical example of her mentor, Edmund Gosse. Two centuries apart, both Philips and Guiney were praised as English Sapphos. I offer a queer reading of the meeting of these two Sapphos in Guiney’s edition of Philips’s Poems (1904) through their shared orientation to the practice and poetics of queer female virtu “buried or completed in The Friend”.