Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
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Standard Name: Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert,,, Countess of
Birth Name: Mary Sidney
Married Name: Mary Herbert
Titled: Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
Titled: Countess of Pembroke
Mary Sidney wrote with a generation of Protestant women models behind her.
Hannay, Margaret P. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford University Press, http://U of A HSS.
x
But her reputation, even her literary existence, has been eclipsed by the almost mythic fame of her brother Philip. He was older, publicly known, and universally admired even before his death. He published nothing; his writings reached the wider world by passing through the hands of his sister and of their friend Fulke Greville
. Her writings encompass wholly independent texts, collaborations with Philip, and her revisions of work by him. The dates at which she wrote them are mostly debatable. But unlike any other Elizabethan noblewoman, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, published her non-religious works as well as her religious. Her work in translation (not only the psalms); and in lyric poetry and heroic drama (perhaps in pastoral romance as well) helped shape the mainstream literary tradition.
The author's name appears respectfully as Mris [i.e. Mistress] Anna Hume. The main title-page prints Love, Chastitie, and Death one below the other and brackets them. The Triumph of Chastitie and The...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Bradstreet
AB
was writing poetry while still in her teens. Langland
's Piers Plowman, Sir Philip Sidney
and the Countess of Pembroke
(whose mother, like AB
, was born a Dudley), and Camden
's life...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland
Sir John Davies
of Hereford, in dedicating The Muses Sacrifice, 1612, to Elizabeth Lady Cary, Lady Pembroke
, and Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford
, praised Cary's plays as a source of pride to...
Occupation
Petrarch
The acclaim that Petrarch won in his lifetime shifted smoothly into a high reputation after his death. The first English author to refer to him was Chaucer
.
Nicholl, Charles. “On the Sixth Day”. London Review of Books, Vol.
41
, No. 3, pp. 23-6.
24
He was a vital inspiration to...
Occupation
Sir Philip Sidney
In this role he was remarkably versatile: high romance in the Arcadia (written between 1578 and 1582), religious feeling and metrical experiment in the psalms which he began translating with his sister, sophisticated criticism in...
Occupation
Lady Anne Clifford
LAC
attended the funeral of Anne of Denmark
; here she enjoyed much talk with my Old Lady of Pembroke
Clifford, Lady Anne. The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616-1619: A Critical Edition. Editor Acheson, Katherine O., Garland.
111
and other acquaintances: she notes this to be the last time she saw Lady Pembroke.
Clifford, Lady Anne. The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616-1619: A Critical Edition. Editor Acheson, Katherine O., Garland.
111
Occupation
John Donne
The highly literary great ladies of the Renaissance were part of Donne's writing environment. His predecessors in metrical experiment included Mary, Countess of Pembroke
. He wrote in praise of her and of minor court...
Occupation
Christopher Marlowe
It may have been as an undergraduate that CM
began writing work that was later published. His several translations from Latin included love-poetry by Ovid
. He soon moved on from poetry to drama, and...
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, and Lucy Cary. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry; with, The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters, edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, University of California Press, pp. 1 - 59; various pages.
6
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, and Lucy Cary. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry; with, The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters, edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, University of California Press, pp. 1 - 59; various pages.
179
Publishing
Lady Mary Wroth
It was hastily produced, incomplete, with sonnet-sequences attached. Urania occupied 558 tightly-printed pages. The elaborate pictorial title-page engraved by Simon Pass
mentions the names of LMW
's writing uncle
and aunt
together with her own...
Reception
Anna Hume
AH
's vigorous heroic couplets were called the finest version of Petrarch before the twentieth century by George Watson
in his bibliography of Petrarch in English, 1967.
Watson, George. The English Petrarchans. Warburg Institute.
1n
(Watson noted a marked avoidance of direct...
Reception
Mary Oxlie
This work listed MO
as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton
, seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland
The play is a Senecan tragedy, written for the closet, not the public stage, though it is worth remembering that upper-class circles reading or performing such plays were connoisseurs of the highly dramatised masque...
Textual Features
Anne Finch
Its courtly tone is not unlike that of generically similar works of a century back, by Mary Countess of Pembroke
, for example, but Solomon argues that many other aspects of the play (likw cross-dressing...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Richardson
She titled this Instructions for my children, or any other Christian, Directing to the performance of our duties, towardes God and man. Her source, she says, is the Bible,
Leigh, Dorothy et al. Women’s Writing in Stuart England. Editor Brown, Sylvia, Sutton.
