New biography of 17th-century Welsh poet Katherine Philips restores her place in the lesbian canon

A major biographical study by Welsh historian and author Norena Shopland, titled My Love All Love Excels: The Remarkable Life and Times of 17th-Century Poet, Katherine Philips, has been released in the United Kingdom by Parthian Books, with a United States publication set for November 12, 2026. The book offers a comprehensive reappraisal of Katherine Philips (1632–1664), an Anglo-Welsh writer of the Civil War era remembered by contemporaries as “The Matchless Orinda” and celebrated historically as “The Welsh Sappho.”

According to a review by LGBTQ+ History Month founder Rodney Wilson in LGBTQ Nation, mainstream historians and literary critics have spent nearly three centuries straightwashing the poet’s legacy. Academic orthodoxy routinely divorced Philips from Sappho’s association with same-sex love, framing her passionate verses addressed to women merely as chaste, platonic exercises in Christian friendship. In historical retrospectives, any platonic affection toward men was taken as definitive proof of heterosexuality, while establishing romantic bonds with women was subjected to an impossible evidentiary threshold.

Shopland’s research demonstrates that from her boarding-school days in London, Philips (born Katherine Fowler) formed deep, emotionally intimate relationships with girls and young women. Her adolescent verse explicitly rejected conventional expectations of matrimony, contrasting creative autonomy with the prospect of “blustering husbands,” “pangs of childbirth,” and “children’s crys.” Following the third marriage of her widowed mother to wealthy landowner Richard Philipps, Katherine relocated to Wales, residing at Picton Castle in Pembrokeshire. In 1648, she entered into a pragmatic marriage with James Philipps, the widowed husband of her late stepsister. The partnership was fraught with personal and political division: her husband aligned with the Puritan Parliamentary cause, while Katherine remained a staunch supporter of the Royalist Stuart monarchy.

To cultivate intellectual community, Philips established the Society of Friendship, a network of women and men across Wales and England who exchanged poetry and correspondence under pastoral pseudonyms. Philips adopted the name Orinda—likely inspired by Olinda, a theatrical character enamored with a cross-dressed heroine. At the center of her poetic output were intense verses dedicated to intimate female companions, particularly Anne Owen (christened Lucasia) and Mary Aubrey (Rosania). Borrowing the sensual cadence and rhetoric of contemporary male homoerotic verse, Philips composed poetry of striking emotional intensity; when these bonds fractured, she authored lines laced with grief and betrayal, berating estranged confidantes as “lovely apostates” and “double murderers” of love.

Philips also achieved a milestone in dramatic history: her translation of Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Pompey, staged in Dublin in 1663, was the first play by a woman to receive a commercial theatrical production in Britain and Ireland. Her life was cut short in London in June 1664 at the age of thirty-two by smallpox. The poet was first reclaimed as an overlooked queer forebear in the early twentieth century by American writer and researcher Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920). While Shopland cautions that modern labels such as “lesbian” cannot be mapped unproblematically onto seventeenth-century social realities, she concludes that Philips’s verse evokes a direct emotional recognition among women today, firmly cementing her standing in the lesbian literary canon.

Biographer Norena Shopland is an established Welsh cultural historian and the author of ten books. In 2021, she advised the Welsh government on integrating queer history into museums, archives, and libraries, and in 2022 led an initiative documenting open-access LGBTQ+ history across all twenty-two Welsh counties. The book’s official launch was celebrated at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and at Picton Castle.

The preservation and interpretation of historic same-sex literature has previously featured in Uránia’s coverage: writer Anne Carson reintroduced the fragments of Sappho into contemporary queer aesthetics, the turn-of-the-century Parisian sapphic salons were examined in a review of Memory Rehearsal, and the methodology of preserving marginalized queer texts was analyzed in Stephanie Andrea Allen’s monograph We Must Document Ourselves Now.