Abstract
Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester (1651–1681) was an English Restoration poet. Handwritten poems by her are held in the Portland manuscript collection at the University of Nottingham, which also contains works by her husband, John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (Wilmot: 1660-1680). Despite her husband’s fame, Wilmot’s poetry is little known. Scholarly attention she receives is often limited, focusing on her role as Rochester’s wife. Thanks to two late twentieth-century publications, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Poetry (1988), and Love’s Witness: Five Centuries of Love Poetry by Women (1993), which include two of her songs, Wilmot now has some independent poetic recognition.
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References
Beal, Peter. 2013. Discovering, Identifying and Editing Early Modern Manuscripts: English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, Vol. 18. London: British Library.
Cooper, Susan Margaret. 2011. “Notes on John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester.” Notes and Queries 58 (3): 381–86.
Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. 1988. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. London: Virago.
Hamilton, Anthony. 1889. Mémoirs of the Count de Grammont. London: Vizetelly.
Latham, Robert, and William G. Matthews, eds. 2000a. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 6, 1665. Oakland: University of California Press.
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Treglown, Jeremy. 1980. The Letters of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wilmot, Elizabeth. c. 1660-1680. Songs. PW V 31. Portland Collection. Nottingham University Library, Nottingham.
Further Reading
Bowles-Smith, Emily. 2008. “Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry.” M/C Journal 11, no. 6. https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.73.
Burns, Edward. 1990. “Absent from Home: Female voices and male reading, in Aphra Behn, Rochester and Elizabeth Malet.” In The Body and the text: Hélène Cixous, Reading and Teaching, edited by Helen Wilcox, 175–83. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Farley-Hills, David. 1972. Rochester: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge.
Greer, Germaine. 2000. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Horndon: Northcote House.
Hartmann, Cyril Hughes. 1955. “Rochester’s Marriage.” History Today 5 (12): 840–49.
Hollis, Jill. 1993. Love’s Witness: Five Centuries of Love Poetry by Women. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Wilson, Harold J. 1943. “Rochester’s Marriage.” The Review of English Studies 19 (76): 399–403.
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Mills, A. (2022). Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_230-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_230-1
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Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester- Published:
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_230-1