Anne Wharton facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Anne Wharton
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portrait by Peter Lely
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| Born | Anne Lee 20 July 1659 Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, England |
| Died | 29 October 1685 (aged 26) East Adderbury, Oxfordshire, England |
| Occupation | poet & verse dramatist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | English |
| Notable works | Love's Martyr |
| Spouse | Thomas Wharton |
Anne Wharton (née Lee, 20 July 1659 - 29 October 1685) was an English poet and verse dramatist. Little of her work was published in her lifetime, but some 45 pieces have been ascribed to her.
Contents
Life
Anne Lee was born 20 July 1659 at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, the posthumous younger daughter of Sir Henry Lee, and a member of a wealthy family. Her mother Anne Danvers, daughter of Sir John Danvers, died not long after her birth. She and her sister Eleanor were brought up at Adderbury House, where they lived with the mistress, mother and grandmother of its owner, the poet and libertine John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who was Anne Wharton's uncle.
On 16 September 1673 she married Thomas Wharton (1648–1715). ..... Her husband soon neglected her and they had no children.
Death
Anne Wharton died on 29 October 1685 at Adderbury, Oxfordshire. Her death, in her sister Eleanor's house, was very painful. The poet Robert Gould in an eclogue to the memory of Eleanor, who died in 1691, observes that her own was a peaceful one by comparison:
"Think how her sister, dear 'Urania' [i. e. Anne], fell,
When ev'ry Arte'ry, Fibre, Nerve and Vein
Were by Convulsions torn, and fill'd with Pain..."
Allegations
.....
Her letters to her husband from Paris seem devoted, but when he visited her again in Paris, to obtain her signature on some documents to do with her £8000 estate, her ardour seems to have cooled.
Works
Wharton is remembered today for the verse drama Love's Martyr; or, Witt above Crowns, and for a number of lyrical poems and biblical paraphrases, but all that was published in her lifetime was a heartfelt elegy on Rochester's death, under the pseudonym Urania. This brought appreciative poetic responses from Edmund Waller and Aphra Behn. Behn's was a verse-letter addressed to Anne, included in her 1684 Poems on Several Occasions, in which she took the opportunity of defending herself from a charge of bawdiness brought by the future bishop Gilbert Burnet, who had attended Rochester on his deathbed. Anne may also have prompted Behn to provide a prologue for Rochester's play Valentinian, which was first performed in 1684.
A modern critical edition of 34 known works by Anne Wharton appeared in 1997, but at least eleven other poems have been discovered in manuscript since then. Her "Elegy on the Earl of Rochester" appears in the New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse (1991) and "A Paraphrase on the Last Speech of Dido in Virgil's Aeneis" in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology.
A Song
How hardly I concealed my Tears?
How oft did I complain?
When many tedious Days, my Fears
Told me I Loved in vain.
But now my Joys as wild are grown,
And hard to be concealed:
Sorrow may make a silent Moan,
But Joy will be revealed.
I tell it to the Bleating Flocks,
To every Stream and Tree,
And Bless the Hollow Murmuring Rocks
For Echoing back to me.
Thus you may see with how much Joy
We Want, we Wish, Believe;
'Tis hard such Passion to Destroy,
But easy to Deceive.
