Reading Mary Wroth

Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England

Miller, Naomi J., and Gary Waller, eds.

Paper Edition, $20.00s
Paper ISBN: 0-87049-710-3
Status: Out of Print

Library of Congress No.: LC 91-390
Copyright Year: 1991
256 pp.

Not available for purchase

Description

Reading Mary Wroth
Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England
Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller
In the past decade increasing critical and scholarly attention has been devoted to the writings of Lady Mary Wroth (ca. 1587-1653). Niece to Sir Philip Sidney and to Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, two of the leading figures of British Renaissance literature, society, and politics, Wroth was perhaps the most accomplished woman writer of her day. She wrote the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English by a woman, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, one of the first plays by a woman, Love’s Victory (only recently published for the first time), and a long and intriguing prose romance, The Countesse of Mongomeries Urania.
Born into the illustrious Sidney family, In her youth Mary Wroth figured prominently in Jacobean court society and married a wealthy landowner. But she came under public censure, both for her effrontery in presuming to write secular fiction and poetry, considered outside the province of women, and for her long-standing affair with her cousin, William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, by whom she had two illegitimate children. Her writings were withdrawn from publication, or remained in manuscript, and she ended her life in seclusion and financial difficulty.

Mary Wroth is perhaps the first woman writer in English who clearly saw herself as having the vocation of a writer and whose works express a self-conscious resistance to patriarchy. This collection of essays offers a range of alternative interpretations of Wroth’s life and work, drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and various new historicist perspectives. The essays suggest too how Mary Wroth, in her approach to gender and genre, to constructions of subjectivity and of sexual difference, was herself engaged in representing alternatives to Renaissance patriarchal positions.

The Editors: Naomi J. Miller is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona. Gary F. Waller is a professor of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie-Mellon University.