Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

27 October 1561 - 25 September 1621

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.

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.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
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	Cicely Hamilton	The pageant required more than fifty actresses, only three of whom had speaking parts, to portray famous women from history (not all of them remembered today). In the initial, Scala production, the only speaking role...
Family and Intimate relationships	Margaret Hoby	Three months after her first husband's death, the twenty-year-old Margaret Devereux (later MH ) married Thomas Sidney (younger brother of the poets Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke ). Hoby, Margaret. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605, edited by Joanna Moody, Sutton, p. xv - lvii. lv
Family and Intimate relationships	Margaret Hoby	Editor Joanna Moody suggests that as the wife of Thomas Sidney, MH must have had contact and even exchanged intellectual influence with her sister-in-law Lady Pembroke , but this is pure speculation. Hoby, Margaret. “Introduction and Editorial Materials”. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605, edited by Joanna Moody, Sutton, p. xv - lvii. xxii n16, xxxii n36
Intertextuality and Influence	Anna Hume	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...
Textual Features	Anna Hume	AH 's version of Petrarch is both forceful and stylistically elegant, even when dealing in conventional style with the pangs of love. Her opening lines have a vigorous forward movement which is perhaps superior even...
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...
Textual Production	Aemilia Lanyer	AL accompanied her title poem with elaborate paratextual matter, both to introduce and to conclude it. Before the narrative come nine individual prefatory addresses or dedications to powerful ladies of the court, all except one...
Textual Production	Lady Jane Lumley	Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth also translated a Greek tragedy at a precocious age, but her text does not survive. This non-survival and non-publication left it for Mary, Countess of Pembroke , to become the first...
Anthologization	Lady Jane Lumley	The next year, a modern scholarly edition of LJL 's work appeared, as The Tragedie of Iphigeneia, in Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, edited by Diane Purkiss together with plays by the Countess of Pembroke
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...
Travel	Florence Nightingale	In April 1851 FN was finally allowed to leave home after six months. She visited Sidney and Elizabeth Herbert at Wilton near Salisbury in Wiltshire. Nightingale, Florence. Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale. Editors Vicinus, Martha and Bea Nergaard, Harvard University Press. 45 This historic house had been country home for...
Friends, Associates	Caroline Norton	In the mid-1840s CN acquired some new friends: biographer John Gibson Lockhart , author Alexander William Kinglake , rising young statesman Sidney Herbert (direct descendant of the Countess of Pembroke ), and the intellectual translator...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships	Katherine Parr	KP 's younger sister, Anne, married William Herbert (later first Earl of Pembroke) and bore a son whose wife was Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke .

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