Katherine or Catherine Philips (née Fowler; 1 January 1631/2 – 22 June 1664), also known as "The Matchless Orinda", was an Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator, and woman of letters.

[2] She attended boarding school from 1640 to 1645 where she began to write verse within a circle of friends and to appreciate French romances and Cavalier plays from which she would later choose many of the pet names she gave to members of her Society of Friendship.

[3] Philips also broke with Presbyterian traditions, in both religion and politics, by becoming a member of the Church of England, as well as an ardent admirer of the king and his policy.

"[5][7] The Society of Friendship had its origins in the cult of Neoplatonic love imported from the continent in the 1630s by Charles I's French wife, Henrietta Maria.

[citation needed] Her home at the Priory, Cardigan, Wales became the centre of the Society of Friendship, the members of which were known to one another by pastoral names: Philips was "Orinda", her husband "Antenor", and Sir Charles Cotterel "Poliarchus".

[4] In 1662 she went to Dublin to pursue her husband's claim to certain Irish estates, which, due to her late father's past monetary investments in the British military, they were in danger of losing.

[8] There she completed a translation of Pierre Corneille's Pompée, produced with great success in 1663 in the Smock Alley Theatre, and printed in the same year both in Dublin and London,[4] under the title Pompey.

After her death, in 1667 an authorised edition of her poetry was printed entitled Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda.

Edward Phillips, nephew of John Milton, placed Katherine Philips high above Aphra Behn, writing in Theatrum poetarum (1675), a list of the chief poets of all ages and countries, that she was "the most applauded...Poetess of our Nation".

According to Gosse, Philips may have been the author of a volume of Female Poems ... written by Ephelia, which are in the style of Orinda,[4] though other scholars have not embraced this attribution.

For example, in discussing "To the Excellent Lucasia" Mark Llewellyn argues that the image portrayed by the speaker is "stripped of all sensual appetite, could become the pathway to apprehension of, and eventually mystic union with, divine love and beauty" (447).

Upon the Double Murder of King Charles is a more politically minded piece than many of her others from this time period, although she is often associated with a class of poets termed Royalist or Cavalier poets, noting their political sympathy to the Royalist cause, those who supported the monarchy of King Charles I of England during the English Civil War and the following English Interregnum.

In fact, many of her poems were written for or about fellow Society of Friendship members Anne Owen and Mary Aubrey, who went by the names of Lucasia and Rosania, respectively.