Elizabeth Rowe became a poet when it was not fashionable for English women to do so. Who was this woman who befriended the Thynnes of Longleat and the poet John Boyle
Elizabeth Rowe was one of the most accomplished women of her age. Yet despite her genius for poetry, she chose to spend much of her life in quiet privacy.
Early Life
She was born during 1674 at Ilchester in Somerset. Her father was Walter Singer, a dissenting minister. Elizabeth was the eldest of three daughters. Walter, his wife and their family moved to Frome in Somerset. Elizabeth was already writing poetic verse at the age of twelve.
Longleat and the Thynnes
During the 1690s Elizabeth established a friendship with the Thynnes of Longleat in Wiltshire. Frances Thynne (the future Countess of Hertford), would become a lifelong friend of hers.
Thomas Ken
The former Bishop of Bath & Wells, Thomas Ken, retired to Longleat after losing his diocese during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He also befriended Elizabeth, encouraging her interests for music and poetry.
Athenian Mercury
Elizabeth began to send verse to the literary publication Athenian Mercury - her Poems on Several Occasions being published when she was still only twenty two. Years later, the editor of Athenian Mercury, John Dunton, spoke of Elizabeth as "...the richest genius of her sex...".
Marriage
During 1709 Elizabeth met at Bath one Thomas Rowe, a scholar who was thirteen years her junior. They fell in love and were married in the following year. Their happiness was short-lived however: Thomas died at Hampstead in 1715, a victim of consumption. Elizabeth was heartbroken. Her verse of this time expressed her anguish:"In what soft language shall my thoughts get free, my dear (Thomas), when I talk to thee?"
A Country Retreat
Elizabeth retired to her native West Country. She took up residence at Rook Lane House in Frome: which she shared first with her father until his death in 1719 – and then with John Bowdin, the Congregational pastor of neighbouring Rook Lane Chapel.
She inherited considerable property in both Ilchester and Frome following her father's death. However Elizabeth never lost her humility and gave freely to charity.
She found comfort in the solitude of Frome, seldom leaving the town throughout the rest of her life. Yet Elizabeth would occasionally meet with her constant friend FrancesThynne, now Countess of Hertford, to whom the former confided in 1726: "I am certainly dead and buried according to your notions of life, interred in the silence ... of a country retreat."
Throughout the later years of her life, Elizabeth wrote verse and prose of skill & piety that would eventually earn her an international reputation. Her compositions of this time included Friendship in Death, or Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728), Letters Moral and Entertaining (1729-32), and the poetical epic History of Joseph (published in1736).
Elizabeth died at Frome in February 1737. During her final years she befriended the poet and author John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, who lived at Marston House near Frome. He wrote the following to a fellow poet, a Mrs Barber on 10th May 1737: "Your Sister Muse, Mrs Rowe, is dead. I had a most moving letter from her to take her last Farewell of Me." The Countess of Hertford remarked, somewhat sadly, that Elizabeth would "...not go from Frome but to her grave".
Her legacy lived on after her death. Her works became extremely popular, being translated into French and German and reprinted into the following century.
Elizabeth has not been forgotten in the town that was so close to her heart. During 1974, the Frome Society for Local Study erected a plaque at Rook Lane House to mark the tercentenary of her birth.
