This section contains 4,738 words (approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: "To the Angell Spirit… Mary Sidney's Entry into the World of Words," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 263-75.
In the following essay, Fisken discerns a strain of subversiveness in "To the Angell Spirit, " which she describes as "the disjunction between Mary Sidney's internalized definitions of her role as a woman and her burgeoning ambition as a writer. "
"To the Angell spirit …" is one of just four known original poems by Mary Sidney.1 The bulk of her writing fell within the parameters of translation and religious paraphrase which were considered culturally acceptable literary activities for women during her time. However, her verse-paraphrases of Psalms 44-150, which completed a project initially conceived and begun by her brother Philip Sidney would be more rightly termed "imitations" in the classical sense, as...
This section contains 4,738 words (approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |