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...