ABSTRACT
Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, whose first part was issued in 1621, was a publishing sensation, as hers was the first prose romance to be issued by a woman in England. Although Wroth received praise for her literary endeavours, notably from Ben Jonson, 1 she was also the target of a violent misogynistic attack from Sir Edward Denny, a prominent member of the court and a former close friend of the Sidney circle (of which Wroth was a member, as daughter to Sir Robert Sidney and niece to both Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke). Denny deemed himself and his family slandered by one particular episode of the romance, in which a father forces his daughter to marry a violent, unfaithful man and sides with him when he brutalises her. The circumstances were indeed strangely similar to those in which the Denny household had been engulfed a few years earlier (Hannay 2010, 235–7). However, Denny’s attack did not stop at the personal implications of the episode. He wrote letters and a lyric to Wroth castigating her frivolous pride in writing love stories instead of following her aunt’s example and penning religious poems. Denny’s poem circulated widely, as did Wroth’s own poetic response. Wroth also wrote to Denny protesting her innocence. The scandal created by the controversy prompted Wroth to write to the Duke of Buckingham on 15 December 1621, saying that the romance was published against her will and that she intended to have it removed from the stalls. To this day, however, no convincing evidence has been found proving that Wroth acted on her promise (Smith 2000, 411). Furthermore, other letters and testimonies show that Wroth circulated copies of Urania and exchanged with several readers who requested ‘keys’ matching some of the fictional characters of her romance and their real-life models. Far from listening to Denny’s advice, Wroth even penned a continuation of her romance, which, though it never appeared in print, seems to have circulated at least among a select number of relatives and friends, as a letter from Sir George Manners to Wroth shows (Wroth 1983, 244–5).
