ABSTRACT

In late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, it seems to have been thought that romances were mainly read by women. There is evidence for this in the fact that numerous romances were dedicated to women and included authorial asides addressed to female readers; and in satirical or moralistic writings which held up women’s taste for romance to ridicule or opprobrium. The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania was, the first published romance in English which was authored by a woman. Lady Mary Wroth was influenced by The Faerie Queene, Orlando Furioso, and other romances besides the Arcadia. She was writing within a genre whose conventions had hitherto been shaped by male writers — yet one of those conventions was a concept of romance as ‘feminine’. Wroth’s narrative voice differs from that of male-authored romance in that it is not explicitly gendered. In fact, Wroth’s narrator is often in the shadows, on the sidelines, as narratives are framed within narratives.