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.
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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 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
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...
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.
151
and her principle...
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...
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...
Textual Production
Emma Jane Worboise
EJW
also wrote novels which respond in similar manner to Charlotte Yonge
's Heartsease; or, The Brother's Wife and Elizabeth Sewell
's Amy Herbert. In each of these (titled respectively Hearts-ease in the Family...
Textual Production
Carol Rumens
Since this year, 2007, CR
has been picking a Poem of the Week for the Guardian newspaper, which prints the poem along with her commentary and analysis. Rumens like to pay attention to context and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Maureen Duffy
The protagonist, Jade Green, runs her own practice, which is, to put it kindly, struggling. (Sister heroines like US detective writer Sue Graham
's Kinsey Mahone come to mind.) She is consulted by an academic...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Her attitudes and judgements are unfailingly interesting. She knows that Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
(whom she calls Mary Herbert), was not only a great encourager of letters but also herself an ingenious...
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.
