Author: Philipps, Janetta
Biography:
PHILIPPS, Janetta (1776-1844: ancestry.co.uk)
Long thought to be a young girl in Oxford for whom Shelley developed an enthusiastic attachment and organised the subscription list and printing of her Poems (1811), it is quite clear she was much older and had only a loose connection to Oxford. She was almost certainly the Janetta Philipps baptised 22 July 1776 at St. Mary, Pembroke, daughter of Mr. Thomas Philipps. At some point some members of the family must have moved to Somerset, possibly Bridgwater, where a Richard Philipps, a widower, remarried in 1792, with three witnesses who were later subscribers to her Poems (1811). He himself is probably the subscriber who took six copies. We do not possess Philipps’ letters to Shelley but it is clear she robustly rejected his overtures. The connection between Shelley and Janetta Philipps is Charles Strong, Fellow of Wadham, who had extensive family connections to the Bridgwater/Pawlett area of Somerset and Tiverton in South Devon, areas which figure prominently in the Subscribers’ List. It was Strong who probably first showed her poems to Shelley. Philipps had earlier published a novel, Delaval (1802), which included several pieces reprinted in Poems. She does not appear to have moved from the Somerset/South Devon area and was recorded as a governess at Knighthayes, on the outskirts of Tiverton, in the 1841 Census. She died in 1844 from cancer and a heart attack and was buried at West Monkton, Somerset. (Subscribers List, Poems [1811]; ancestry.co.uk; findmypast.com; Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1847] 1:83-6; Frederick L. Jones, ed. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1964] 1:88-90, 106) AA