Lives and Afterlives of the Sidney Women Writers

Aurélie Griffin is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature and Translation at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France. She specialises in early modern women’s writing and is the author of a monograph entitled La Muse de l’humeur noire. Urania de Lady Mary Wroth, une poetique de la melancolie (2018; shortlisted for the SAES/ AFEA research prize).Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University, UK. She has published widely on Shakespearean drama, most recently co-authoring The Arden Encylcopedia of Shakespeare’s Language: Plays and Characters (2025). She has edited and published on early women’s drama and staged productions, including Wroth’s Love’s Victory (2022).

• Introduction; Part 1: Re-writing Lives; Chapter 1: 'Here is a book': drawing fortunes through drama in the Sidney women's writing; Chapter 2: Relocating the Sidney women: Mary Sidney Herbert, Barbara Gamage Sidney and Mary Sidney Wroth in London; Chapter 3: Masquing Wroth; Part 2: Intertextual Lives: Re-writing Literary Traditions; Chapter 4: The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and the Mirrors for Princes tradition; Chapter 5: Reading and Making Mornay's A Discourse of Life and Death in Seventeenth-century England; Part 3: Cross-Cultural Lives: Gateways to the Orient; Chapter 6: The Troubles of friendship: Mary Sidney Herbert's The Tragedie of Antonius and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam; Chapter 7: An 'Orient pearle' or 'the rightful Sophie'? The dual representation of Persia and its Queen in the Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania; Part 4: Afterlives: Writing After the Sidney Women; Chapter 8: Embracing the Ouroboros: Reimagining the Sidney family women through fiction; Chapter 9: Mary Sidney Herbert and the defense of early modern women writers on the contemporary Stage