Women Naming Women: The Use of Sobriquets by Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Katherine Philips

Abstract

Sobriquets were commonly used by British writers of the late 16th and 17th centuries. The sobriquets chosen by Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, and Katherine Philips, the three central women poets of the period, their literary sources, and their associations and significance are discussed. Each of the three writers names herself and her friends and in so doing transcends the alternatives of invisibility or notoriety, apparently the only choices available to women writers of the time. By using sobriquets, the writers identify themselves and their friends as inhabitants of a different and unorthodox world, but one which includes recognition as writers and as members of a community of writers.