Catharine Trotter Cockburn - Legacy

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.