Content area
Full text
1. Identifying Mrs Stanley1
In the history and criticism of Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, the field of investigation has spread far beyond Sidney and his works, as the pages of this journal attest. From his immediate family-his sister, his brother, his father, and his niece Mary Wroth-attention has also turned to people who have rewritten his work or adapted and translated it, such as Anna Weamys. In this grouping there is perhaps less known about the eighteenth-century rewriting of his work by Mrs. Stanley than any other contributor to Sidney's afterlife, as Clare R. Kinney recently reminded us.2 Stanley appears on the title page of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia Moderniz'd in the collocation "by Mrs Stanley," and the dedication of the text to Her Highness the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Ansbach is signed off by D. Stanley, but the preface to the work that follows is unsigned.
In 1947, Earl R.Wasserman (the first critic to spend more than a couple of lines on Stanley's text) added an ambiguity to the lack of information about her identity by referring to her in his index as "Eliza Stanley."3 Paul Salzman described her as the "unknown Mrs. Stanley" in 1985, and in 1996 Martin Garrett suggested an identification of Stanley through Sir Hans Sloane, who is listed as a subscriber to Stanley's text: "Sloane's daughter Sarah had married in 1719 George Stanley of Paultons ...'D'- Dorothy?-was perhaps a relation of his."4 Mrs. Stanley has seemed trapped in the signature to her edition, caught on the title page in firm clear print, elsewhere elusive.
Enter one Samuel Pegge (1704-1796):
Mrs Stanley, who modernized Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, was sister to Lady Caswell, and her maiden name was Dorothy Milborne. She married to her first husband Mr Edward Stanley, younger brother of John Stanley, Esq. of Crundale in Hants. Mr Stanley was a wholesale grocer at London; but falling into misfortunes, went to the East Indies, and there died. In his absence she enterprized, and published the Arcadia; after which she married Mr West, an Irishman bred to the law, by whom she had several children, having had none by Mr Stanley that lived. She was possessed of a talent of writing letters agreeably, many of which I...