Author: Josephine A. Roberts
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 1992-09-01
Total Pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9780807117996
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Although her poems are little know today, Lady Mary Wroth was one of the most accomplished women writers of the English Renaissance. Her poems were circulated among many of the leading authors of her time, including Ben Johnson, who praised her work for its profound understanding of the nature of romantic love. Lady Mary's sonnet cycle, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was the first English sequence to be written from a women's perspective. The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, her romance interspersed with poetry, was one of the first works of prose fiction to be composed by an Englishwoman. In this complete edition of Lady Mary Wroth's verse, Josephine Roberts has brought together and annotated all 192 of the surviving poems, many of which have never been published before. As the eldest daughter of Sir Robert Sidney and Lady Barbara Gamage, Lady Mary took great pride in the Sidney literary heritage. During the years of her marriage she assumed the roles of both poet and patron, an example set for her by her father and her more famous uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. She further followed the precedent of her uncle by choosing for her own work the artistic forms that he had favored -- the sonnet sequence, pastoral romance, and pastoral drama. As a young woman, Lady Mary belonged to Queen Anne's intimate circle, but in the years following her husband's death she suffered a precipitous decline in social status. She violated the social taboos of her age by becoming the mistress of her first cousin, William Herbert, earl of Pembroek, and bearing him two illegitimate children. Her artistic efforts aroused equal controversy when, after the publication of her prose romance, the Urania, several prominent noblemen attacked her for portraying their private lives under the guise of fiction. Despite these obstacles -- and the added burden of the unpaid debts that were the legacy of her disappointing marriage -- Lady Mary maintained an independent spirit and trusted in an ability to make her own decisions. In her prose works she lashed out at the hypocrisies of life at court; in her poetry she wrote of more personal concerns -- the treacherousness of emotion, the eternal elusiveness of love. Rising above well-worn Elizabethan conceits, the best of Lady Mary's poems reveal an ambivalence toward romance and a wise understanding of the vicissitudes of human emotion.
Author: Lady Mary Wroth
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is the first modernized edition of the poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Born circa 1587 and married in 1604, Lady Mary was part of the Queen's entourage at the court of King James I. The poems reproduced here are from Urania, a chivalric romance published in 1621, and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, a sonnet sequence.
Author: Lady Mary Wroth
Publisher: Medieval and Renaissance Texts
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780866984515
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first romance written by an Englishwoman, Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania is a literary tour de force in its own right. As the niece of Sir Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth was ideally situated as an observer and reporter of the social, literary, and political milieu of her time. This abridged modern-spelling edition, with a useful introduction and index of characters, makes this work newly accessible to general readers, students, and scholars.
Author: Mary B. Moore
Publisher: SIU Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780809323074
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Moore (English, Marshall U.) analyzes and contextualizes the Petrarchan love sonnet sequences of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Lady Mary Wroth, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Close readings of the poems are accompanied by theory and criticism regarding constructs of women, historical events, and biographical material, illuminating the poets, Petrarchism as a convention, ideas about women, and the range and limitations of female roles as erotic subjects and objects. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Gary Fredric Waller
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780814324363
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"William Herbert (1580-1630), third earl of Pembroke, and Lady Mary Wroth (1587?-1653?) were first cousins, the nephew and niece of Sir Philip Sidney, whose family was one of remarkable literary and political importance. Herbert was a poet, a voluminous letter writer, and one of the Jacobean court's richest and most powerful courtiers and politicians. Wroth was arguably the most important woman writer of the period; she authored the first Petrarchan poetic sequence, the first prose romance, and one of the first plays in English by a woman. In addition to their connections as cousins and as writers, they were lovers and the parents of two illegitimate children." "The Sidney Family Romance is both a "cultural biography" and a symptomatic reading of the sexual and textual relationships of Herbert and Wroth. Waller's analysis of their letters and literary works relies on a variety of critical apparatuses - social history, current political and social theories of the Jacobean period, and most notably (feminist) psychoanalytic theory. In both his biographical information and interpretive comments, Waller focuses on subject construction and gender construction of the early modern period, to find that Herbert's poems proceed from his life at court to engage in the gender politics of Petrarchan poetry, while Wroth's work proceeds from her disempowered position to project a desire for an autonomy which would lead to mutuality between the sexes." "Waller tries to find ways of analyzing the "inner lives" of his subjects, in the absence of direct evidence, and with a paucity of documentation. He examines historical documents, including the writings of the two cousins, and recent historical research, along with contemporary studies of family interactions and gender construction and detailed case histories drawn from nearly a century of clinical and therapeutic studies. The author concludes with a discussion of the crisis of gender in the seventeenth century as a contemporary crisis as well." "Family history has long been central to Renaissance studies. The Sidney Family Romance proceeds far beyond any previous works in bringing to bear the very rich and complicated network of ideas, observations, and literary images in the works of Herbert and Wroth."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved