Catharine Trotter Cockburn's Defense of Locke

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), born in London to a naval family left in reduced financial circumstances after her father's early death, was almost entirely self-taught, learning French, Latin, and logic on her own initiative, and first achieved public recognition not as a philosopher but as a successful playwright: her tragedy Agnes de Castro was staged in London in 1696, when she was seventeen, followed by several further plays performed at Drury Lane and elsewhere through the 1700s, making her, alongside contemporaries such as Mary Pix and Delarivier Manley, one of a small handful of commercially produced women dramatists of the Restoration and early 18th-century London stage.