University of Virginia Library

Biographical note

Lady Mary Wroth, "daughter to the right noble Robert, Earl of Leicester, and niece to the ever famous and renowned Sir Philip Sidney...and to the most excellent Lady Mary, Countess of Pembroke"[1], was born in 1586 or 1587.[2] She was often in the home of her namesake, Mary Sidney Herbert, where she had access to classical and humanist literature and the unpublished works of various Sidneys, including probably the Old Arcadia. Throughout much of young Mary's childhood, Robert Sidney was in charge of the English garrison at Flushing, in the Netherlands, and was able to see the family only at infrequent intervals. Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, he began a rapid rise at Court, being created Baron Sidney of Penshurst by King James. Thereafter the family was frequently seen at Court, and Mary, now a young woman, became an active participant in Court doings about 1604. She participated in Court Masques before Queen Anne, one of which was Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, which was designed by Inigo Jones. Jonson took an interest in Mary Sidney's writing, as did a number of other poets of the time, including George Chapman. Jonson dedicated The Alchemist to Mary, and wrote of her that her sonnets made him "a better lover and a much better Poet" [3].

Mary Sidney was married in 1604 to Sir Robert Wroth. The match apparently was not a happy one [4]. Her husband ran up massive debts and died in 1614, leaving the young widow to apply to the King for relief from her creditors. She had one child from her marriage, who died at about the age of two, and two "natural" children whose father was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, her first cousin and very probably the person in her life for whom Amphilanthus is a persona.

Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania appeared in 1621, perhaps in a bid for income from writing. The first ever long fiction work by an Englishwoman, it recounts the adventures of Pamphilia, Queen of Pamphilia, and her lover Amphilanthus, interspersing many incidental stories of women disappointed in love, particularly as a result of their being married by their families to the wrong man. Some of the stories appear to have been based on intrigues in the Court of King James; as a consequence Lady Mary was ordered to withdraw the book from sale and it was never reprinted. A second volume may have been planned, as the story is continued in manuscript but remains unfinished. The sonnet cycle presented in the present etext edition, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appears at the end of the Urania under separate pagination but clearly intended to be read as written by the fictional persona of Pamphilia. An unpublished pastoral drama, Loues Victorie, comprises the remainder of Wroth's known work. The scandal over the publication of the Urania seems to have permanently discredited Lady Mary Wroth at Court, and almost nothing is known of her later years. She never remarried, and died about 1651-3.