Today on the site I”m pleased to welcome Norena Shopland, author of My Love All Love Excels, the biography of Katherine Philips: the seventeenth-century Welsh poet whose love for two women dominated her life. Before we get to the post, here’s a little more info on the book:
Katherine Philips: the first woman to have a play commercially produced; a seventeenth-century poet writing about love, society and relationships during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War. But as with many early women writers, she has been largely forgotten by historians, and she slipped into obscurity a few decades after her death in 1664.
She lived in violent times; a Royalist while her husband was a Parliamentarian. With the restoration of the monarchy she faced a choice, leave him to his fate or save him. Yet it is her love for two Welsh women that dominated Katherine’s life, and these relationships were writ large in her poems to the point where scandal, detailed for the first time in this book, threatened to destroy her reputation.
My Love All Love Excels is an extraordinary account of a remarkable writer who was deeply passionate, complex and loyal. A woman who lived life on her own terms.
Buy it: Parthian Books | Bookshop (November preorder)
And here’s the post, by Norena Shopland:
Same-sex relationships between women in the historic past are often harder to find than those of men. Many that do exist in queer history are there because of what was written about them, rather than because we hear from the individuals themselves.
Katherine Philips is different. She wrote openly of her love for two women.