Writing to her friend Charles Cotterell after the unauthorized 1664 publication of her poetry, Katherine Philips cites some lines from Edward Dering's “Epilogue” to the 1663 London edition of her translation of Corneille's La Mort de Pompée:

Eager to protest her literary virginity, Philips in fact slightly misquotes Dering; he actually wrote that the play's “Scenes” could not be taxed with blemishing the blushing sex, and that its “words” (not “lines”) were “chast”. The inaccurate transcription works to draw attention away from the fact that Pompey is a play, and not a poem, a literary work which possessed “Scenes” to be enacted and whose “lines” were intended to be closely memorized and recited by actors to a paying public rather than shared and reacted to by readers, or groups of readers.

Philips' letter to Cotterell itself undergoes a more deliberate editorial intervention when it was reprinted as one of the Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus in 1705, more than thirty years after her death. In this second version, the diction has been dignified and standardized; the first letter refers to the 1664 publication of Poems. By the Incomparable, Mrs. K. P. as “this most afflictive accident,” while in 1705 it becomes a “treacherous Accident,” for example.