Catharine Trotter Cockburn

Catherine Cockburn

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (16 August 1674? – 11 May 1749) was a novelist, dramatist, and philosopher.

Life

Catharine Trotter was most likely born in 1674 rather than the later date of 1679, which had been previously accepted.[1] Born to Scottish parents living in London, Trotter was raised Protestant but converted to Roman Catholicism at an early age. She finally returned to the Church of England in 1707, after what she terms much "free and impartial Enquiries." She was aided in this by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who wrote the preface to her A Discourse Concerning the Controversies, 1707. After an illustrious career, her father, navy captain David Trotter, died of the plague in 1684, leaving his family in financial jeopardy.

Catharine was a precocious, physically attractive, and largely self-educated young woman, who had her first novel (The Adventures of a Young Lady, later retitled Olinda's Adventures) published anonymously in 1693, when she was but 14 years old. Her first published play, Agnes de Castro (a verse dramatisation of Aphra Behn's story of the same title), was staged two years later. In 1696, she was famously satirised alongside Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix in the anonymous play, The Female Wits. In it, Trotter was lampooned in the figure of "Calista, a lady who pretends to the learned languages and assumes to herself the name of critic." Her second and arguably best-liked play The Fatal Friendship was staged in 1698. Trotter's dramatic works generally met with modest public success and qualified praise from critics. Playwright William Congreve encouraged and guided her dramatic writing.

In 1702, at the age of 23, Trotter published her first major philosophical work, A Defence of Mr. Lock's [sic.] An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. John Locke was so pleased with this defence that he made gifts of money and books to his young apologist acting through Elizabeth Burnet who had first made Locke aware of Trotter's "Defence".[2] Trotter went on to write two more works on moral philosophy, two theological tracts, and a voluminous correspondence.

In 1708, she married Reverend Patrick Cockburn, and all but ceased to write until 1726, when she began another philosophical treatise. Her new family suffered financially and socially because Rev. Cockburn would not take the Oath of Abjuration upon the ascension of George I. The Reverend finally overcame his scruples in 1726, and he was appointed to St. Paul's Chapel in Aberdeen.

Catharine's work attracted the attention of William Warburton, who prefaced her last philosophical work. She also had a request from the biographer Thomas Birch to aid him in compiling a collection of her works. She agreed to the project but died before the work could be printed. Birch posthumously published a two-volume collection entitled The Works of Mrs. Catharine Cockburn, Theological, Moral, Dramatic, and Poetical in 1751. It is largely through this text that readers and history have come to know her.

Legacy

Despite her one-time renown, Trotter's reputation has steadily waned over the last three centuries and has only been rescued from near obscurity by the efforts of feminist critics, such as Anne Kelley, in the last two decades. Arguably, the predicament of her reputation is attributable to her having written a large amount of work very early in her life and less in her mature years. In other words, her career was extremely front-loaded, and the literati of her period (especially the men) tended to focus on her youth and beauty at the expense of her work. Some literary historians attribute her relative obscurity to a persistent emphasis being placed upon her philosophical work at the expense of her creative writing (especially by her biographer Thomas Birch, who included only one play in his two volume collection of her work and did not mention Olinda's Adventures at all). Though skilful, her philosophical writings were sometimes dismissed as derivative, especially her defence of Locke's Essay—a judgment that could hardly help her reputation.

Much of the scholarly interest in Trotter's dramatic writing now centres on gender studies. Indeed, Trotter herself was cognisant of the limitations her gender placed upon her and often voiced her protest in writing. In the dedication to Fatal Friendship (1698), for example, she remarks that "when a Woman appears in the World under any distinguishing Character, she must expect to be the mark of ill Nature," especially if she enters into "what the other Sex think their peculiar Prerogative." Both Trotter's literary works, in which women dominate the action, and her personal life provide rich subject matter for feminist criticism.

Play Productions

Books (short titles)

Other publications

Works in Print

References

  1. ↑ recent research, detailed in Anne Kelley, Catharine Trotter: An early modern writer in the vanguard of feminism (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002) supports this claim, which has been authenticated by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  2. ↑ Waithe, edited by Mary Ellen (1991). A history of women philosophers. Dordrecht: Kluwer. pp. 104–105. ISBN 0792309308. Retrieved 5 August 2014.

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