page_title: Elizabeth Singer Rowe
section_title: Literary works
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Singer Rowe / Literary works
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece and title page to Poems on Several Occasions by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, aka Philomela, 1696
context_page_description: Elizabeth Singer Rowe was an English poet, essayist and fiction writer described as "the ornament of her sex and age" and the "Heavenly Singer". She was among the most widely read 18th-century English authors. She wrote mainly religious poetry, but her best known Friendship in Death consisted of a series of imaginary letters from the dead to the living. Despite a posthumous reputation as a pious, bereaved recluse, Rowe kept up a wide correspondence and was involved in local concerns at Frome in her native Somerset. She remained popular and often translated well into the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic. Though little read today, scholars note she was stylistically and thematically radical for her time.
context_section_description: Something of a prodigy, Rowe began writing at the age of 12, probably without her parents' knowledge. At 19 she began a "platonic" correspondence with John Dunton, a bookseller and founder of the Athenian Society, which was the source material for Dunton's "outrageous," "hilarious" and "sinister", 61-page summary of his relationship with Rowe entitled "The Double Courtship." Between 1693 and 1696 she was the principal contributor of poetry to Dunton's The Athenian Mercury, but later regretted her affiliation with him, as "a print-world impresario" whose adaptions of masculine gallantry to commercial print were "ridiculed" by the literati.
  Many of these poems were reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions, also published by Dunton. During this time, she wrote in imitation of Pindar under the pseudonyms Philomela and the Pindarick Lady, Pindar's approach to writing odes on abstractions was a popular verse form in the late 17th century. 
  Poems on Several Occasions (1696)
  Written under the pseudonym Philomela, this collection was published by John Dunton when Rowe was twenty-two.  
  Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions (1704)
  Published in 1704, Rowe was the featured poet in this collection of didactic religious poetry, which also included Richard Blackmore, John Dennis and John Norris.
  Poems on Several Occasions (1717)
  This collection contains pastorals, hymns, an imitation of Anne Killigrew, a "vehement defence of women's right to poetry," in which she defends women, "over'rul'd by the Tyranny of the Prouder Sex." This volume included one of her best known poems, "On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe", an impassioned poem which she wrote in response to the untimely death of her husband. The poem is said to have been an inspiration for Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1720), and he included it in the second edition. In it she wrote, "For thee at once I from the world retire,/To feed in 
  silent shades a hopeless fire." She kept her word and retired to her father's house in Frome.
  Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters From the Dead to the Living (1728)
  Undoubtedly her most popular work, Friendship in Death, first published in 1728, went through at least 79 editions by 1825 and another ten by 1840. In the 18th century, editions of this work consistently outnumbered Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Richardson's Clarissa and the gap grew wider as the century progressed. The work consists of imaginary letters from virtuous friends and loved ones, including a two-year-old child to his grieving mother, who have died, gone to heaven and wish to impart spiritual advice, mainly in the interest of making sure that the souls of friends and loved ones go to heaven. The subject matter of the letters consists mainly of moral dilemmas and contemporary issues; many of the letters are reminiscent of moral essays, while others are closer to the situations depicted in novels. Here Rowe seems to be conducting a campaign against the libertinism found in amatory fiction. In the preface, Rowe states her didactic intent, "The Drift of these Letters is, to impress the Notion of the Soul's Immortality; without which, all Virtue and Religion, with their Temporal and Eternal good Consequences, must fall to the Ground." According to the spirits, death is to be welcomed and not feared since the soul experiences bliss in heaven.
  Rowe's most immediate and well known literary model for Friendship in Death was Tom Brown's Letters from the Dead to the Living (1702) although Brown's work features famous men who make witty comments both on infamous contemporaries and hell. Friendship in Death is informed by the epistolary tradition, apparition literature, and patchwork literature, and influenced many subsequent protracted death scenes such as in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple. Volume the Last (1753).
  Letters on Various Occasions, in Prose and Verse  (1729)
  This collection includes the first part of Letters Moral and Entertaining.
  Letters Moral and Entertaining (1729-32)
  Letters Moral and Entertaining was a three-part series o
caption: Frontispiece and title page of Poems on Several Occasions, 1696.