In This Article

Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 15 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the work of Mary Wroth. The first of two parts of Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania appeared in the bookshops of London in 1621; the second part remained unpublished until 1999. It was the first extant romance written by an Englishwoman and represents a landmark in the history of English prose. Appended to the printed portion of her romance was a sonnet sequence ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, the first secular sonnet sequence written by an Englishwoman. First published in 1988, her play Love's Victory is the first original play known to be written by an Englishwoman. For these ‘firsts’ and, even more, for the high quality of her writing, Mary Wroth is now established as a canonical figure from the early modern period; her work is well known to specialists and to students alike.

Keywords: English prose writers, romances, prose, women authors, plays, sonnets

Mary Ellen Lamb

Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is the author of The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (Routledge, 2006), and co-editor of Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare (Routledge, 2009) and Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (Ashgate, 2008). She has published essays in such journals as English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Criticism, and Review of English Studies. She is the editor of the Sidney Journal and serves on the editorial board of English Literary Renaissance. Her abridgement of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (2011), with modernized spelling, is now available from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.