Anne Killigrew

Born in London in 1660, Anne Killigrew grew up in a well-connected royalist family whose members were active in court and literary life. Reliable sources describe her as both a poet and a painter, and she later served at court as a maid of honor to Mary of Modena.

Her surviving work shows talent in two arts at once. A posthumous 1686 collection gathered her poems, while a small number of paintings are also associated with her, including a self-portrait. Because so little personal documentation survives, parts of her life remain hard to reconstruct in detail.

Killigrew died in 1685 at about twenty-five years old, likely of smallpox. Even with such a short life, she made a lasting impression on later readers, in part because John Dryden memorialized her as a remarkable young woman accomplished in both poetry and painting.