Lady Mary Wroth
-
Standard Name: Wroth, Lady Mary
Birth Name: Mary Sidney
Styled: Lady Mary Sidney
Married Name: Lady Mary Wroth
LMW
achieved two firsts with a single publication in 1621: the first full-length fiction (a prose romance) to be written in English by a woman and the first sonnet sequence in English by a woman (discounting the less than certain ascription of a sonnet sequence based on Psalm 51 to Anne Locke
). Outside this landmark publication, she is known to have written other poems, a play, and surviving letters.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
death | Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke | She is buried in the choir of Salisbury Cathedral, under the steps to the high altar. Her niece and god-daughter Lady Mary Wroth
, had published her Urania just two months earlier, but her... |
Dedications | Hannah Wolley | This has three dedications: to Anne Wroth
(daughter of Anne, Lady Maynard
), to Wroth's daughter Mary
, and to To all Ladyes and Gentlewomen in general, who love the Art of Preserving and Cookery... |
Family and Intimate relationships | Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke | Her niece Lady Mary Wroth
, an important writer, has only recently been accorded the fame she merits. |
Family and Intimate relationships | Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke | Her eldest child, William
, was later the lover of her niece Lady Mary Wroth
. |
Family and Intimate relationships | Dorothy Sidney, Countess of Sunderland | The poet Lady Mary Wroth
was an aunt of DSCS
(whose father was Wroth's younger brother). She was probably writing her romance Urania about the time that Dorothy was born. |
Family and Intimate relationships | Henrietta Euphemia Tindal | HET
extensively researched her own genealogy. Among the families from which she established that she was the sole representative Tindal, Henrietta Euphemia. Rhymes and Legends. Richard Bentley and Son, 1879. xiii |
Family and Intimate relationships | W. H. Auden | Nicholas Jenkins
of Stanford University
formerly maintained on his website at http://www.stanford.edu/~njenkins/ a section called W. H. Auden. Family Ghosts, designed to show how Auden's family, despite his claims to ordinariness, sprang from a... |
Friends, Associates | Frances Neville, Baroness Abergavenny | Her family networks, too, were Protestant. Her parents were close friends and country neighbours of Katherine Brandon Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk
(letter-writer, patron of women writers, friend and associate of Katherine Parr
). In 1563... |
names | Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke | There is no writer whose names are more problematic. For centuries she was traditionally known as the Countess of Pembroke (perhaps because this full form appears in the title of her brother's Arcadia) instead... |
Occupation | Lady Anne Clifford | LAC
performed (with Lady Mary Wroth
) in Ben Jonson
's Masque of Beauty. Katherine Acheson
, editor of LAC
's early diaries, dates this performance 1609. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. under Ben Jonson Spence, Richard T. Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery. Sutton Publishing, 1997. 20 |
Reception | Mary Oxlie | This work listed MO
as one of its Women among the moderns eminent for poetry. Phillips, nephew and pupil of John Milton
, seems quite interested in the existence of women poets. Others in his... |
Textual Features | Judith Man | JM
writes well, both in her text itself and in her preface. She expresses the modesty and humility which were de rigueur for a female author at this date, saying that those in authority over... |
Textual Features | Delarivier Manley | The text belongs to a genre well-known in France as the chronique scandaleuse, and popularised in England through the writings of Madame d'Aulnoy
(who had been much translated, and had already influenced DM
). It... |
Textual Features | Augusta Webster | In these unsentimental poems AW
revises the conventions of the sonnet sequence in rather the way that Lady Mary Wroth
had done in 1621. She focuses on a love-object, here the daughter, Loverlike to me... |
Textual Features | Margaret Cavendish | Her address to her husband rejoices that he has never bidden her to stop writing and work (that is do needlework) instead. In this connection she quotes from Lord Denny
's attempt to silence Lady Mary Wroth |
Timeline
23 January 1590
Edmund Spenser
dated (using the old-style reckoning of 1589) his letter to Sir Walter Raleghexpounding his whole intention in the first three books of The Faerie Queene, which was published soon afterwards.
November 1616
Ben Jonson
published his Works, including (unconventionally) nine plays, as well as masques and two poetry collections.