ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Wroth was a member of the famous Sidney family who set a stamp on Elizabethan and early Jacobean society in the fields of courtesy, literature, and politics. The Sidneys retain an aura of mystique and glamour even (perhaps especially) in the present day in a different, nuclear age. Unlike her uncle Sir Philip Sidney and, later, her aunt the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Wroth remained obscure both as a woman and as a writer, in part because she dared to write fiction that dealt with such matters as love and sex, rather than confining herself like her aunt to religious and moral works and to translation. ‘Worke oth’ workes leave idle bookes alone/for wise and worthyer women have writte none,’ snarled a contemporary satirist of the first and only work by Lady Wroth to appear in print during her lifetime, in 1621.1
That book constituted the first part of a prose romance by Lady Mary Wroth, which she dedicated to her best friend Susan Vere (first wife of Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, younger brother to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke) and entitled The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, or, Urania (1621). The work, however, was suppressed soon after it was published, on the grounds that it was a romam-à-clef which caricatured prominent members of the court of James I. Whether Lady Wroth ever intended to have her work published remains in doubt, but there is no question about her seriousness as an author.2 Apart from the printed first half of Urania (1621), four of her holograph manuscripts survive, a sequence, ‘Songs and sonnets beginning with poems from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ (a version of the poems appearing in the published part of Urania), a sec-ond half of the romance called ‘The first and second books of the secound part of the Countess of Mongomerys Urania’ (‘Urania, Part Two’), and an almost completely unknown pastoral drama called ‘Loves Victorie,’ which exists in two copies.3
