The paper deals with Katherine Philips’s mourning elegies, which have never attracted the attention of Russian specialists in the history of English literature. The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that although female writings attract considerable attention overseas, the literary heritage of the English female poets of the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, among whom Katherine Philips occupies the central place, has not been studied by Russian scholars so far. In addition to this, the genre of the English elegy of the second half of the XVIIth century has been addressed by few researchers. In the article the mourning elegy is regarded as a modification type of the elegiac genre, and the criteria on the basis of which the poems of Philips are classified as such are defined. The writer of the article draws the conclusion that the artistic originality of Philips’s elegies is accounted for by the fact that she uses national elegiac tradition combined with the reflections on her unique role of a female poet. The article emphasizes the eclectic character of the religious beliefs reflected in the elegies and stresses that the slyle of Philips’s mourning elegies was affected by neo-classical aesthetics.