Like Arachne of Ovid's Metamorphoses, challenging Minerva's weaving skill, Wroth defied Jacobean constraints upon women as producers of culture....
Biography
by Nandini Das
Lady Mary Wroth is best known today as the first English woman writer to have published an original work of prose fiction.
For her contemporaries, however, her primary identity was as a member of the illustrious Sidney family.
It is my aim to discuss in this paper how actually Wroth shows in two of her sonnets that Pamphilia's self-imposed faithfulness to her philanderer lover —.
As the elaborately decorated title-page of her book announced to the world in , she was, after all, "Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earl of Leicester, and Niece to the ever famous, and renowned Sir Philip Sidney knight, and to the most excellent Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke." It was an identity in which Wroth herself took enormous pride, and which left a decided mark on all her writing.
Mary’s father, Sir Robert Sidney, had married the wealthy Glamorganshire heiress Lady Barbara Gamage in in spite of Queen Elizabeth’s initial opposition to the match.
Mary was born on October 18, or , into an extended network of kinship that connected some of the most important families of the Elizabethan court.
Childhood &n