ABSTRACT
The romance genre in early modern England was endlessly flexible, serving a range of authorial needs. This chapter considers the most direct manifestations of the impulse to romance the self in early modern England. Whether William Temple expressing the passions of the different characters to find a vent for his own, Mary Wroth imagining different solutions for her own romantic problems via a variety of characters and plots, Dorothy Calthorpe recording family history via romance-like names and motifs, or Anna Weamys enjoying authorial fulfillment by picking up the dangling narrative threads of the ever-admired Philip Sidney, all found ways of manipulating the genre for unique self-expression. But for early modern women especially, whose means of emotional and intellectual fulfillment were inevitably constrained by societal norms, the romance genre enabled writing themselves or their families in the conditional or subjunctive mode, as they could have, should have, or might have been.
