Lady Mary Wroth

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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.
Full-length portrait of Lady Mary Wroth attributed to John de Critz the elder, c. 1620. She stands holding a theorbo that reaches to her shoulder, in a picture with striking touches of red. Wroth's stiff, embroidered gown and large, transparent ruff are pale; her petticoat and belt are red, and her arms, shoulders, and bust are picked out with red bows. She rests an arm of a red sofa, with red curtains behind.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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.
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England. Methuen.
xiii
She opens the book proper with a submerged...
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 Production Lady Hester Pulter
In the same volume as her poems, LHP 's scribe copied the first part of The Unfortunate Florinda. Pulter herself made some corrections, and her unfinished draft of the second part, on loose sheets...
Textual Production Margaret Hoby
Letters survive at Penshurst that MH wrote to her sister- and brother-in-law Barbara Sidney, née Gamage and Robert Sidney (parents of Lady Mary Wroth ). She wrote to Sir Robert Cecil about her fears and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Lucy Aikin
LA was enough of a scholar to include information on the then little-known Lady Mary Wroth .

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