Lot 311: KILLIGREW, ANNE.

Poems. For Samuel Lowndes, 1686

4to, mezzotint portrait frontispiece by I. Beckett after the author, table at the end, contemporary panelled calf, tiny wormholes near bottom margin affecting a few letters, rebacked, missing tiny pieces near head of the spine

Wing K442; Macdonald 22; Pforzheimer 569; Kissing the Rod, ed. Germaine Greer et al. (1988)

J.L. Rebow of Colchester and John Gurdon Rebow; Lord Fairfax of Cameron, bookplates

Anne Killigrew (1660-85) was daughter of James, Duke of York's chaplain Dr Henry Killigrew and a niece of the dramatists Thomas and Sir William Killigrew. She served as Maid of Honour to James's wife Mary of Modena, dying of smallpox in her twenty-fifth year. Her poems were posthumously published by her father, who requested Dryden to write the prefatory poem "To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poesie, and Painting". Besides writing verse, she had, in fact, also painted scenes and portraits, including both James II (now in the Royal Collections) and Mary of Modena, as well as the self-portrait which was engraved for her Poems. "Her admirers depicted Anne Killigrew as the quintessential virtuous virgin, immune to the seductions of Charles II's court" (Greer, p.299).