SOURCE: “The Heroics of Constancy in Mary Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania,” in Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990, pp. 142-93.

In the following excerpt, Lamb provides a biographical reading of Urania, arguing that it is a work of implicit female anger in the face of male sexual indiscretions.

Especially when contrasted with the countess of Pembroke's association of authorship with the art of dying, Mary Wroth's composition of the first romance written in English by a woman appears remarkably unresponsive to the pressures exerted against women's writing in the Renaissance. An original work rather than a translation, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania runs to almost 590,000 words in its two sections: a folio printed, with or without Wroth's consent, in 1621 and suppressed shortly thereafter, and a shorter manuscript in Wroth's holograph existing in a single copy now in the collections of the...