When the Welsh government in 2021 embarked on what Deputy Minister of Social Partnership Hannah Blythyn described as a project to make Wales “the most LGBTQ+ friendly nation in Europe,” Welsh scholar Norena Shopland was commissioned to help train librarians, museum staff, and archivists on the inclusion of LGBTQ+ history.

In 2022, Shopland served as founding researcher in an inspiring and beautifully done countrywide effort to write a local LGBTQ+ open-access online history for each of the twenty-two counties of Wales, providing, she wrote, “a means by which local people, allies and events can be celebrated instead of replicating mainstream narratives and celebrities.”

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A prolific researcher and writer (see here for a full list of published works), Shopland’s latest book, published this year, is My Love All Love Excels: The Remarkable Life and Times of 17^th-Century Poet, Katherine Philips.

Published by Parthian Books in the UK in June and forthcoming in the United States on November 12, the book is an engaging account of the life, loves, letters, and poems of Katherine Philips, whose life spanned from the early 1630s to the mid-1660s. It was a time of great upheaval, arising from the Puritan critique against the Anglican Church, early settlements of British peoples in what would become the United States, and the regicidal British Civil War.

Born Katherine Fowler, Philips was the daughter of an affluent London family. Her father made loans to King Charles I and her mother, also named Katherine, ensured that her children were well educated.

A polyglot with extraordinary memory skills (by age ten, she “could repeat verbatim entire sermons she had heard only once”), Philips was a translator, poet, and playwright (“the first woman to have a play commercially produced”). Even so, she was “ignored by historians” and largely disappeared from public esteem after her death in 1664 from smallpox, which she called “that fierce disease” when it began to inflitrate her neighbors’ homes.

It took an American lesbian living over 100 years ago, the poet Louise Guiney(1861-1920), daughter of Irish immigrants, to point to Philips as a missing voice. Piecemeal additions to Philips’ legacy over the decades since added color to her portrait but, Shopland notes, most were devoted almost exclusively to her work, not to her life, and most avoided commenting on the meaning of her strong devotion to female friendships.

As far back as boarding school, Philips’s life had involved emotionally intimate relationships with girls and women, and instead of dreaming about traditional married life, teenage Philips pondered in poetry the possibility of choosing a path that avoided “blustering husbands,” “pangs of childbirth,” and “children’s crys to offend y’r ears.”

Her father died when she was about ten. In quick order, her mother’s second husband also died. It was the third marriage, to a wealthy Welshman named Richard Philipps (surname spelling varies), that brought her to her life and legacy in Wales, at first on the Picton Castle estate of her new stepfather, whose family had long “controlled a significant part of south Wales” and would maintain a family home at Picton Castle for almost 500 years, until the 1980s.   

Despite misgivings about wedded life, in 1648 Philips married her stepbrother-in-law, James Philipps, the widowed husband of her late stepsister. She didn’t find an ideal match in her new rich husband, even with his “important titles and offices.” Their tastes were not aligned and their politics differed – she, Royalist; he, Parliamentarian. 

So she set about creating her own circle of similar minds by founding the Society of Friendship, a curated collection of intellectuals across Wales and England who during the next two decades exchanged a multitude of letters about their literary proclivities.  

Katherine bestowed Society names on the members, christening herself Orinda, which may have been a reference to Olinda, a character in a play who falls for a “gender-disguised heroine” revealed to be female – to Olinda’s delight. (The city of Orinda, California, was named by an admirer of Katherine Philips’ poetry, whose husband, a son of Scottish immigrants, purchased a large tract of land from which the city emerged.)

Readers of Shopland’s biography get to meet many of the women and men who found their way into Philips’s world, including some whose Society names those of cross-dressing characters who fell in love across lines of sex and gender. When Society friendships soured, Philips sometimes unleashed furious poems upon estranged female friends: “vain double murderer”; “Lovely apostate!”

While she “avoids any reference to physicality and concentrates on the spirituality of friendship,” she utilized “the sensual language of the more homoerotic poems of male writers.” Even so, for nearly three hundred years after her death, the “determination to divorce Katherine’s from Sappho’s reputation for same-sex love” ran through “almost everything written” about her.  

Proving that someone long dead was heterosexual takes only one intimate friendship with someone of the other sex, while proving that a person was notheterosexual requires a mountain of evidence, which rarely is available for those living in the past. 

While there is “the possibility that Katherine was someone whom we might regard as lesbian today,” this biography’s purpose is not to prove that. “What is proven,” Shopland concludes, “is that Katherine’s writings evoke an emotive response from those who are openly lesbian, placing Katherine firmly in the lesbian literary canon.”

The book is set amid the historical and literary contentions of the era (including Philips’s husband’s 1662 trial for the execution of a prominent Royalist), and also within the context of her families of origin, her marriage, and her profound grief at losing a child in 1655, 

Shopland pays close attention to how the currents of external and internal worlds and their demands and disappointments played out during Philips’s lifetime. Enriching the text are illustrations of individuals and places and dozens of Philips’s poems, expertly employed by Shopland to walk the reader into the exquisite mind of the poet.

Shopland, a Welsh Pinc List National Treasure, is precisely the right person to unpack Philips’s mysterious inner life, with all its nuances of sexuality and affections. My Love All Love Excels, Shopland’s tenth book, well balanced for an academic and popular audience, is a thoroughly engaging biography, a capstone of the efforts to establish Philips among the great women of letters, and a major contribution to the study of the woman who came to be known as “The Welsh Sappho.”

Rodney Wilson is the founder of LGBTQ+ History Month USA and a co-founder of the International Committee on LGBTQ+ History Months.