Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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 eldest child, William
, was later the lover of her niece Lady Mary Wroth
.
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
was that of the husband of the poet Lady Mary Wroth
(who, however, herself left...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Sidney Countess of Sunderland
The poetLady 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
Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke
Her niece Lady Mary Wroth
, an important writer, has only recently been accorded the fame she merits.
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 et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
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
Lucy Hutchinson
This satirical eulogy uses the method of line-by-line contradiction of Waller
's poem in the manner used by Lady Mary Wroth
in Railing Rimes Returned upon the Author about thirty years before. It skewers Cromwell
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
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
Textual Features
Antonia Fraser
Fraser quotes here from Eliot
's tribute in Middlemarch to the silent influence of those who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
qtd. in
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Methuen, 1985.
xiii
She opens the book proper with a submerged...
Timeline
23 January 1590: Edmund Spenser dated (using the old-style...
Writing climate item
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.
Spenser, Edmund. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Editors Smith, James Cruikshank and Ernest De Selincourt, Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1916.
407-8, 394
November 1616: Ben Jonson published his Works, including...
Writing climate item
November 1616
Ben Jonson
published his Works, including (unconventionally) nine plays, as well as masques and two poetry collections.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Texts
Roberts, Josephine A., and Lady Mary Wroth. “Introduction and Notes”. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, Louisiana State University Press, 1983, pp. 3 - 75, 219.
Wroth, Lady Mary. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Editor Waller, Gary F., University of Salzburg, 1977.
Wroth, Lady Mary. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Editor Roberts, Josephine A., Louisiana State University Press, 1983, http://BLC.
Wroth, Lady Mary. Urania. J. Marriott and J. Grismand, 1621.
Wroth, Lady Mary. Urania. Editor Roberts, Josephine A., Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1995.
Wroth, Lady Mary. Urania Part Two. Editors Roberts, Josephine A. et al., Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.