SOURCE: "The Pastoral Romance," in Women Writers: Their Contribution to The English Novel 1621-1744, 1944. Reprint by Cork University Press, 1946, pp. 47-69.

In the following excerpt, MacCarthy examines Wroth's The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania in the context of Elizabethan prose traditions and the influence of Sydney's Arcadia, and shows how Wroth blends realism and romanticism through the use of sub-plots and dialogue.

In 1621, in the person of Lady Mary Wroath, woman made her first contribution to English prose fiction. Having barely mentioned the name of the first English woman-novelist, we must at once retrogress after the manner of a writer who introduces his heroine only to leave her standing while he laboriously sketches in the background. But truly it would quite impossible to judge the work of Lady Mary Wroath without at first considering briefly the state of Elizabethan and Jacobean prose fiction of which her novel was an...