ABSTRACT
Mary Sidney Herbert's (MSH's) representation of herself as a writer in “To the Angell Spirit” does not simply occur through her mapping of her authority to write onto a version of two related genealogical relationships: between brother and sister; and between literary progenitor as poet-father and literary heir as poet-son. In heterosexual terms, the image of the Psalmes as child speaks to MSH's lived reality as the lynchpin of the Herbert family's patrilineal continuity, which depended on her fecundity. Just as MSH takes on the risky and daring project of imagining her authorship in terms of the multi-erotic and multi-sexual conjunction of sibling muses, reclaiming pregnancy and birth as genealogical tropes of a specifically female and collaborative poetic production, so she also takes on the conflicted meanings of blood and bleeding in the period, meanings that in her culture and the poem itself shift between the genealogically charismatic and the unsettlingly physiological and humoural.
