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An Collins is the otherwise unknown writer credited with the authorship of Divine Songs and Meditacions, a collection of poems and prose meditations published in 1653. All that is known of her life must be discovered in this volume. There is a strong strain of spiritual biography in her work, and from "To the Reader," the "Preface" and "The Discourse," it can be assumed that she lived in the country, probably with a disability or chronic illness. She was middle-aged, had no children, and makes little mention of family. There is some indication that she had a community of coreligionists, though her religious affiliation is difficult to determine, whether Protestant or Catholic. She was writing during the English Civil War and, judging from her remarks on the necessity of resignation, faced considerable difficulty. Difficulty which served, it would seem, as inspiration: "So sorrow serv'd but as springing raine / To ripen fruits, indowments of the minde."

Works

 * Divine Songs and Meditacions Composed By An Collins. London: R. Bishop, 1653.

Resources

 * Brydges, Sir Egerton. Restituta; or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of Old Books in English Literature, Revived. 4 Vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814-1816.


 * Dyce, Alexander Rev. Specimens of British Poetesses. London: T. Rodd, 1825.


 * Gottlieb, Sidney. “Collins, An (fl. 1653).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 27 Jan. 2007.


 * ---. “An Collins and the Experience of Defeat.” Representing Women in Renaissance England. Ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. 216-26.


 * Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. "An Collins." Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women's Verse. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988. 148-154.


 * Griffith, A. F. Bibliotheca Anglo-Poetica. London: Thomas Davison, 1815.


 * Howard, W. Scott. “An Collins and the Politics of Mourning.” Speaking Grief in English Literary Culture, Shakespeare to Milton. Ed. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2002. 177-96.


 * ---. “Of Devotion and Dissent: An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653). Discoveries in Renaissance Culture 22.1 (2005): http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nydam/scrc/discoveries/archives/221/howard221pf.htm.


 * Ostovich, Helen, and Elizabeth Sauer. “Introduction.” Reading Early Modern Women. New York: Routledge, 2004. 1-14.


 * Price, Bronwen. “‘The Image of Her Mind’: The Self, Dissent and Femininity in An Collins’s Divine Songs and Meditacions.” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 249-65.


 * Wilcox, Helen. “‘Scribbling under so Faire a Coppy’: The Presence of Herbert in the Poetry of Vaughan’s Contemporaries.” Scintilla 7 (2003): 185-200.

Category:English poets Category:17th-century women writers Category:English women writers Category:Women poets Category:Year of birth unknown Category:Year of death unknown