Overview

The Lives and Afterlives of the Sidney Women Writers charts the multifarious connections between the lives and works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561– 1621), and Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (1587– 1651). Bringing together essays by renowned experts on the Sidney women and a new generation of scholars, the collection shows how the Sidney women did not so much write about their lives as they lived their lives through their texts, and continue to do so in contemporary reinventions of their lives and works. Engaging with contexts of place, race, literary traditions and aesthetics, including two new creative biofictional accounts, the chapters offer dynamic, mutually illuminating perspectives, showing how literary texts and biography enlighten and complicate each other for mutual enrichment. The book’s specific illustrations of fluidity and porousness between the Sidney women’s lives and works offer precise, tailor- made interpretations of the varied circumstances which produced the Sidney women writers.

Full Product Details

Author:   Aurélie Griffin ,  Alison Findlay
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9781032870991

ISBN 10:   1032870990
Pages:   190
Publication Date:   29 May 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Introduction; Part 1: Re-writing Lives; Chapter 1: 'Here is a book': drawing fortunes through drama in the Sidney women's writing; Chapter 2: Relocating the Sidney women: Mary Sidney Herbert, Barbara Gamage Sidney and Mary Sidney Wroth in London; Chapter 3: Masquing Wroth; Part 2: Intertextual Lives: Re-writing Literary Traditions; Chapter 4: The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and the Mirrors for Princes tradition; Chapter 5: Reading and Making Mornay's A Discourse of Life and Death in Seventeenth-century England; Part 3: Cross-Cultural Lives: Gateways to the Orient; Chapter 6: The Troubles of friendship: Mary Sidney Herbert's The Tragedie of Antonius and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam; Chapter 7: An 'Orient pearle' or 'the rightful Sophie'? The dual representation of Persia and its Queen in the Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania; Part 4: Afterlives: Writing After the Sidney Women; Chapter 8: Embracing the Ouroboros: Reimagining the Sidney family women through fiction; Chapter 9: Mary Sidney Herbert and the defense of early modern women writers on the contemporary Stage

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Author Information

Aurélie Griffin is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature and Translation at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France. She specialises in early modern women’s writing and is the author of a monograph entitled La Muse de l’humeur noire. Urania de Lady Mary Wroth, une poetique de la melancolie (2018; shortlisted for the SAES/ AFEA research prize). Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University, UK. She has published widely on Shakespearean drama, most recently co-authoring The Arden Encylcopedia of Shakespeare’s Language: Plays and Characters (2025). She has edited and published on early women’s drama and staged productions, including Wroth’s Love’s Victory (2022).

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