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.1 Yet the authors of Elizabethan and Jacobean romances were men. The only known exceptions to this were The Mirror of Knighthood, translated from Spanish by Margaret Tyler in 1578; and The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, written by Lady Mary Wroth, in 1621. These texts, and especially the latter, are therefore of great interest as interventions by women into a form hitherto aimed at women as consumers, but closed to women as writers.
