Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

This article is about the poet, for the philosopher see Anne Conway , née Anne Finch

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (born April 1661 in Sydmonton , Hampshire , † August 5, 1720 in Westminster , Middlesex ) was an English poet of the Augustan Age (referred to an era in the early 18th century in British culture, as a writer and others Intellectuals admired and emulated the original Augustan era ).

Life

Anne Finch was from Hampshire and was born near Newbury in April 1661 to Sir William Kingsmill and Anne Haslewood. Anne's father died just five months after she was born. The mother married Sir Thomas Ogle in 1662, but died two years later. Anne and her sister Bridget grew up with their grandmother, Lady Kingsmill, after their stepfather died in 1671. The girls enjoyed a progressive education in a private setting, presumably from their uncle Sir William Haslewood.

In 1683 Anne became Maid of Honor to Maria of Modena , the Duchess of York, and in May 1684 she married Heneage Finch , the gentleman of the bedchamber to James, Duke of York . After the revolution of 1688 and the flight of James, who in the meantime had become King James II, Heneage belonged to the so-called nonjurors who did not take the oath on the new King William III. from Orange. The Finchs then stayed far away from London, but Heneage was still on trial and had to endure lengthy negotiations because he had wanted to follow the expelled king to France. In the 1990s Anne and her husband lived in Eastwell Park , Kent , the country estate of Heneages nephew Charles Finch, 4th Earl of Winchilsea. The couple's situation only eased under the reign of Queen Anne (from 1702), and Anne Finch was appointed Lady of the Bedchamber . In August 1712 Heneage surprisingly inherited the title of Earl of Winchilsea when his nephew Charles Finch died childless.

With the beginning of the reign of George I , the couple's circumstances became more difficult again, as an extremely anti-Jacobite Whig government came to power. As a result, Anne Finch's health deteriorated. She had been suffering from depression for a long time . In 1715 she became seriously ill. Until her death in August 1720, her health was impaired accordingly, which is also reflected in her later work.

To the work

Anne started writing in the 1980s. In 1701 four of her poems appeared in Charles Gildon's New Collection of Poems on Several Occasions , in 1713 her collection Miscellany Poems (London: John Barber) came out. Anne was in correspondence with authors and artists such as Alexander Pope , Charles Jervas and Matthew Prior . Many poems after 1715 have a religious content, probably not least because Anne became seriously ill.

After her death, the Countess died in 1720, numerous poems remained unpublished. Anne Finch's verses found their way into various anthologies, but by the end of the 18th century her works were rarely printed. Her poems, particularly the Nocturnal Reverie , were praised by Wordsworth in the essay, Supplemantary to the Preface of his Poetical Works (1815). Reminiscences of her longer poem The Spleen can be found in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man and Shelley's Epipsychidion .

Virginia Woolf dedicates a few pages to Lady Winchilsea in her essay A Room to Yourself and gives excerpts from her poems. In her essay, in preparation for a lecture on women and literature , Woolf thinks about the adverse living conditions of women poets in past centuries. In doing so, she meets the poet Anne Finch, who is outraged in her texts about the position of women in her time.

“How deep have we fallen! - Education only / Made fools of us, not nature. / We have been forbidden to train the mind / And we have been taught dreary rules of propriety; / And when one of them swings higher, / With a bolder spirit and imagination, / If it is so much warmed by opposition / That its fear outweighs hope ”

- Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Works

• A Nocturnal Reverie and Inquiry after Peace are from the Miscellany Poems 1713 collection .
• Adam Posed first appeared in Poetical Miscellanies , vi 1709.

literature

• George Ballard : Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated for their writings, or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences . London 1752.
• Denys Thompson (Ed.): Selected Poems . Carcanet Press, Manchester 1987.
• Jean M. Ellis D'Alessandro (Ed.): The Wellesley Manuscript Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea . Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Florence 1988.
• Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant (Eds.): The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition . Athens 1998.
• Barbara McGovern: Anne Finch and Her Poetry. A Critical Biography . Athens 1992.
• Katharine Rogers: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. To Augustan Woman Poet. In: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Eds.): Shakespeare's Sisters. Feminist Essays on Women Poets . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1979, pp. 37-46.
• Ann Messenger: Publishing Without Perishing. Lady Winchilsea's “Miscellany Poems” of 1713. In: Restoration. Volume 5, No. 1, 1981, pp. 27-37.
• Charles H. Hinnant: The Poetry of Anne Finch. An essay in interpretation . Newark and London 1994.

Web links

• Anne Kingsmill on thepeerage.com

Individual evidence

1. ^ Virginia Woolf : A Room of One's Own , 1929. German translation by Axel Monte: Virginia Woolf. A room to yourself (= Reclam's Universal Library . Volume 18887). Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-018887-3 , pp. 79-84.
2. ↑ Virgina Woolf 1929, p. 80. German adaptation of Axel Monte.