ABSTRACT
Early in Lady Mary Wroth’s manuscript continuation of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, when King Selarinus of Epirus lends a sympathetic ear to a lady he has encountered at the house of the sister of the enchantress Melis-sea. This chapter addresses some of the moments in Part II of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania in which Wroth does seem to be returning to the familiar matter of the 1621 Urania, but in such a manner as to frustrate the interpretive expectations she has previously created. Urania II’s “undoings” of female authority and authorship in general and its erasure of Pamphilia’s identity as exemplary female poet in particular suggest a new anxiety in its creator about her own practices as a female maker. The continuation, while apparendy offering a more conventional romance narrative, also betrays a growing impatience with that mode.
