Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney and the centre of the literary circle at Wilton, where she acted as patron to a generation of poets.

After her brother's death in 1586 she completed the metrical psalter he had begun, revising his Psalms 1–43 and writing Psalms 44–150 herself. The Sidney Psalter, with its extraordinary range of stanza forms, circulated in manuscript and was first printed in 1823.