Lady Mary Wroth : The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Mary Wroth’s major literary works, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania and the poetry collection Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, are distinctively Baroque: Wroth repeatedly, obsessively, demonstrates a fascination with multiple narratives, the blurring of fiction and history, and eruptions of magical or miraculous interventions. She establishes the contours of a female Baroque subject, who has to absorb and attempt to transcend enculturation by the dominant male discourse. What happens when a woman enters the predominantly male discursive poetical playground of Petrarchism? Could a woman envisage anything more than her own fragmentation? Would hers be the ‘same’ anguish as that articulated on behalf of the dominant male subject position? What cultural forces speak through her in addition to those she attempts to control?

“The True Forme of Love”: Transforming the Petrarchan Tradition in the Poetry of Lady Mary Wroth (1587–1631)

The following article deals with the transformation of the Petrachan idea of love in the work of Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1631), the first woman poet to write a secular sonnet sequence in English literature, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The author of the article discusses the literary and historical context of the work, the position of female poets in early modern England and then focuses on the main differences in Wroth’s treatment of the topic of heterosexual love: the reversal of gender roles, i.e., the woman being the “active” speaker of the sonnets; the de-objectifying of the lover and the perspective of love understood not as a possessive power struggle, but as an experience of togetherness, based on the gradual interpenetration of two equal partners.