Catharine Trotter (Cockburn) | Biography

Literary history has not been kind to Catharine Trotter. Once a celebrated dramatist, Trotter is now a curiosity, and not just because she was a female writer. Her misfortune was that she was only fourteen when her novel was published, sixteen when her first play was produced, and twenty-six when she retired. Yet she is more than a curiosity, despite her odd career. Shifts in taste may justify Trotter's literary oblivion, but it just may be that Thomas Birch unwittingly hastened it. A minister and historian, Birch published a two-volume edition of Trotter's work (1751) that emphasized her life after 1706. To Birch, Trotter brought honor to her sex by "a genius equal to most... in the study of a real philosophy, and a theology worthy of human nature, and its all-perfect author." As evidence, he printed 916 pages of Trotter's philosophical and religious works, leaving 115 pages for a...
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