Philips, KATHERINE, 'the matchless Orinda,' was born the daughter of a respectable Presbyterian London merchant, on New-year's Day 1631. A precocious child, she early became strongly royalist in feeling, and in her seventeenth year she married a worthy Welsh gentleman, James Philips of Cardigan Priory. Her earliest poem was an address to Henry Vaughan the Silurist, on the appearance of his Olor Iscanus (1651). About the same time she seems to have assumed her melodious nom-de-plume of Orinda, having formed among her neighbours of either sex a Society of Friendship, the members of which must needs be re-baptised—the ladies as Lucasia, Rosania, Regina, Valeria, Polycrite; the gentlemen as Palæmon, Silvander, Antenor (her own husband), and Poliarchus (Sir Charles Cotterel, her greatest friend, her forty-eight Letters to whom were published in 1705). Orinda is our earliest sentimental writer, and she has tears at will even for the marriages of the lady-members, which she resents as outrages on the sufficiency of friendship. Yet she was a worthy woman and good wife, despite her overstrained sentimentality, and deserved the honour of a dedication from Jeremy Taylor (Discourse on the Nature, Offices, and Measures of Friendship, 1659). She went to Dublin in 1662, and here Roger, Earl of Orrery, and the rest gave her a flattering reception. On a visit to London she caught smallpox, and died at thirty-three, June 22, 1664. At Dublin she translated Corneille's Pompée, and in her last year the greater part of his Horace. Her poems were surreptitiously printed at London in 1663, but an authoritative edition was issued in 1667. The matchless Orinda's poetry has long since faded into forgetfulness, despite the chorus of contemporary praise from Cowley and every poet of note. Keats found her poems in 1817 while writing Endymion, and in a letter to Reynolds speaks of them as showing 'a most delicate fancy of the Fletcher kind.' Mr Gosse conjectures the scarce volume of Female Poems (1679) 'written by Ephelia' to have been the work of Orinda's only daughter, Joan (born about 1654), who married Mr Wogan of Pembrokeshire in 1679.
See the admirable essay by Mr Edmund Gosse in Eighteenth Century Studies (2d ed. 1885).