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An Collins is the otherwise unknown writer credited with the authorship of Divine Songs and Meditacions, a collection of poems and prose meditations published in 1653. All that is known of her life must be discovered in this volume. There is a strong strain of spiritual biography in her work, and from "To the Reader," the "Preface" and "The Discourse," it can be assumed that she lived in the country, probably with a disability or chronic illness. She was middle-aged, had no children, and makes little mention of family. There is some indication that she had a community of coreligionists, though her religious affiliation is difficult to determine, whether Protestant[1] or Catholic.[2] She was writing during the English Civil War and, judging from her remarks on the necessity of resignation, faced considerable difficulty. Difficulty which served, it would seem, as inspiration: "So sorrow serv'd but as springing raine / To ripen fruits, indowments of the minde."[3]

Works

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  • Divine Songs and Meditacions Composed By An Collins. London: R. Bishop, 1653.

Footnotes

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  1. ^ Gottlieb, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
  2. ^ Greer et al., 148.
  3. ^ The Preface to Divine Songs and Meditacions, lines 106-107.

Resources

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  • Brydges, Sir Egerton. Restituta; or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of Old Books in English Literature, Revived. 4 Vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814-1816.
  • Dyce, Alexander Rev. Specimens of British Poetesses. London: T. Rodd, 1825.
  • Gottlieb, Sidney. “Collins, An (fl. 1653).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 27 Jan. 2007.
  • ---. “An Collins and the Experience of Defeat.” Representing Women in Renaissance England. Ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. 216-26.
  • Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. "An Collins." Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women's Verse. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988. 148-154.
  • Griffith, A. F. Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica. London: Thomas Davison, 1815.
  • Howard, W. Scott. “An Collins and the Politics of Mourning.” Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture, Shakespeare to Milton. Ed. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2002. 177-96.
  • Ostovich, Helen, and Elizabeth Sauer. “Introduction.” Reading Early Modern Women. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1-14.
  • Price, Bronwen. “‘The Image of Her Mind’: The Self, Dissent and Femininity in An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions.” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 249-65.
  • Wilcox, Helen. “‘Scribbling under so Faire a Coppy’: The Presence of Herbert in the Poetry of Vaughan’s Contemporaries.” Scintilla 7 (2003): 185-200.


Category:English poets Category:17th-century women writers Category:English women writers Category:Women poets Category:Year of birth unknown Category:Year of death unknown