ABSTRACT
Mary Sidney Herbert is a writer whose works can be easily perceived as shadows and reflections of her brother's authorship. This chapter engages with the debate around an early-modern woman's access to the identity of author. It looks at the ways Sidney Herbert interrogates and uses various aspects of dedicatory and praise poetry in her poems to Queen Elizabeth and investigates how she inscribes a sense of herself as an author. The chapter shows that she displays a strong sense of herself as an empowered and politically engaged writer, without apology or indirection. The figure of the muse is an important one in terms of Sidney Herbert's access to the notion of authority. Sidney Herbert has been read as restructuring by necessity the gendered poet-muse relationship, which assumes that the work of art is the product of the union between the female muse and the, by extension, always male author.
