Mary Sidney was born in 1561, the second of four children who survived infancy. Her grandfather was the duke of Northumberland, her uncles the earls of Leicester and Warwick, yet as the daughter of their sister Mary Dudley and of Sir Henry Sidney, the queen’s deputy in Ireland and Wales, she belonged to the gentry. While this fact dogged the careers of her brothers, Philip Sidney* and Robert Sidney,* Mary’s marriage in April 1577 to Henry Herbert, 2d earl of Pembroke, would have represented for her parents their most conspicuous success. She received a fairly broad humanist education at home (for languages she learned, at the least, Latin, French, and Italian), as well as training in such expected accomplishments as music and needlework, buMary Sidney was born in 1561, the second of four children who survived infancy. Her grandfather was the duke of Northumberland, her uncles the earls of Leicester and Warwick, yet as the daughter of their sister Mary Dudley and of Sir Henry Sidney, the queen’s deputy in Ireland and Wales, she belonged to the gentry. While this fact dogged the careers of her brothers, Philip Sidney* and Robert Sidney,* Mary’s marriage in April 1577 to Henry Herbert, 2d earl of Pembroke, would have represented for her parents their most conspicuous success. She received a fairly broad humanist education at home (for languages she learned, at the least, Latin, French, and Italian), as well as training in such expected accomplishments as music and needlework, but in 1575, after the death of her younger sister Ambrosia, she attracted the attention of the queen, who took her under her wing at court. Her marriage to Pembroke was primarily a political match, cementing the loose Protestant faction formed by the collective interests of her father, uncles, and new husband. Yet it seems to have been a happy marriage, perhaps because of the prompt appearance of healthy male heirs, and to have allowed her a measure of freedom. In 1586, she lost first her parents and then her brother Philip, but in the years between her marriage and this turning point, she and Philip Sidney seem to have spent much time together at Wilton, Pembroke’s main country residence. To this period belongs all of Sidney’s surviving writing, and it is likely that it was done, as Sidney describes his writing of the Arcadia , “most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheetes, sent unto you, as fast as they were done.”
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