SOURCE: “Introduction,” in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, by Lady Mary Wroth, edited and introduced by G. F. Waller, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Waller presents an overview of Wroth's themes and style in, as well as the publication history of, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is a collection of sonnets and songs written by Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1586-1640), probably in the second decade of the seventeenth century. Lady Wroth's poetry was praised highly by Ben Jonson but has never been collected and published in its entirety. One version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was published, with separate pagination, along with Lady Wroth's unfinished Arcadian romance The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (London, 1621); an earlier version of the sequence is found in the Folger Library (MS Va104), which includes thirteen poems not found in the published version, and some eighteen poems re-arranged...