ABSTRACT

In a genre characterized by the interlacing of long and complicated episodes, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania stands out for its proliferation of plots. More than other romances, Wroth’s Urania disperses a multitude of characters over wide expanses of land and sea. Like Philip Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth invested her romance with aristocratic status by appropriating the title of another family countess, Susan Herbert, wife to her cousin Philip Herbert. Like the later medieval romance, the Urania opens up the linear structure of genealogical narratives with the production of a lyric interiority shared with the genre of love lyrics. But the Urania takes this quality of constancy several steps further, so that constancy, and especially women’s constancy, becomes a primary means of achieving heroic status. With its narrative structure spinning off around the tensions between the genealogical projects shaping the genre of romance as well as Wroth s own life, there was no place further the Urania could go.