The Strang[e] Constructions of Mary Wroth’s Urania: Arcadian Romance and the Public Realm

The publication of Urania in 1621 involved Lady Mary Wroth in much more than a familial dialogue. Arcadian romance was available as, in some respects, a discourse already saturated with the criticism Sidney himself had directed against Elizabeth’s policies. When Wroth produced her romance, the homage to Sidney implied by the title (even if it may have been complicated by the nature of Urania itself) had, at least potentially, a serious political implication. Wroth’s romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, is at last becoming the object of the kind of intensive critical analysis formerly reserved for the Arcadia, the romance produced by her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. Wroth’s act in producing Urania is rightly seen as a significant example of female intervention in the masculine world of secular literature. But her own strange constructions within Urania involve an even more unsettling critique directed at a series of distinctions within her society underpinning the exclusion of women from the public realm.