Lady Mary Wroth
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Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1652) was an English poet of the Renaissance. A member of a distinguished English family, Wroth was among the first female British writers to have achieved an enduring reputation.
[edit] Life
Wroth was born in 1587 to Barbara Gamage and Robert Sidney. Her mother, a cousin of Sir Walter Ralegh was a wealthy heiress; her father, while less well-off, was heir of a distinguished family. His father, Henry Sidney, had governed Ireland; his sister Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke was a distinguished patron and translator; and his elder brother Philip Sidney was among the most famous of Elizabethan poet-courtiers.
Because Robert had been appointed governor of Flushing, Netherlands, Wroth spent much of her childhood at the home of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. With her family connections, a career at court was all but inevitable. James I married her to Robert Wroth, of Loughton Hall, Essex, one of his favourites, in 1604. The marriage was not happy; Robert Wroth appears to have been a gambler, philanderer, and drunkard, and when he died he left her deeply in debt. There is no evidence to suggest that Wroth was unfaithful to her husband, but after his death, she deviated from the normal path of a widow and entered into a relationship with her cousin, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. Textual accounts suggest that the relationship produced at least two illegitimate children.
In 1605 Wroth danced at the Whitehall Banqueting House in the Masque of Blackness by Ben Jonson, the Queen's Twelfth Night entertainment. Her father was one of Jonson's patrons, and in 1612 the playwright dedicated his famous comedy The Alchemist to her. Her own play, Love's Victory, explores varieties of love.
In the years after becoming a widow, Wroth wrote her long prose romance, the Urania, dedicated to her kinswoman the Countess of Montgomery. The publication of the book in 1621 was a success de scandale, as it was widely (and with some justification) viewed as a roman à clef. Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham accused her of slander in a satiric poem, and while she returned fire in a poem of her own, the notoriety of the episode may have contributed to her low profile in the last decades of her life. She wrote a continuation of Urania, but did not publish it; she died in 1652.
Her most famous work is the prose romance, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, the earliest known long fiction work by an Englishwoman. It tells the story of Queen Pamphilia and her lover Amphilanthus. A crown of sonnets is found in the extant editions of the work. In these sonnets Wroth shifted the typically male-oriented Petrarchan view to a woman who loves. In this sonnet sequence and others, Cupid becomes a majestic creature worthy of worship, rather than a blind boy who shouldn’t be trusted with arrows. She died between 1651 and 1653.
Sue Taylor has written a short account (2005) of Wroth and her Essex associations.
