Mary Sidney Herbert was an Early Modern Elizabethan English poet, translator, and literary patron. Born into an aristocratic family, she enjoyed a high-class education in French, Italian, Latin, classics, and other subjects like singing, lute-playing, and needlework. In 1577 her arranged marriage to Henry Herbert at fifteen years old made her the Countess of Pembroke. Due to her birth and marriage, she gained “an influence second only to that of Queen Elizabeth” (Mazzola). Her brother, Philip Sidney, died in 1586, and Herbert took it upon herself to enter into court, sponsor other English writers, and begin her own career as a writer and translator. Sidney, himself a writer, left behind unpublished and incomplete works. Herbert published and completed them. Of these, the Sidney Psalms or Sidneyan Psalms are the most well-known. Herbert used a variety of sources to write the Psalms into verses, such as the Book of Common Prayer, the Geneva Bible, other Biblical translations, and some previous English metrical psalms. For the 107 Psalms Herbert translated, she used 128 different verse forms. In addition, she expanded metaphors from the original Hebrew to “comment on contemporary politics, particularly the persecution of… Protestants” (Poetry Foundation). The psalms were completed by 1599, but not published until after Herbert’s lifetime. She published many of her own works, however, and under her own name. During her time, contemporaries considered her a powerful role model, but due to sexist historical revision practices, she has only recently been recognized again as “the most important literary woman of her generation” (Poetry Foundation). (254)

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Poetry Foundation. “Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-sidney-herbert. Accessed 1 Feb 2022.

Mazzola, Elizabeth. “Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.” Obo, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo....  Accessed 1 Feb 2022.