SOURCE: "'Not much to be marked': Narrative of the Woman's Part in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 121-37.

In this excerpt, Miller studies Wroth's creation of a female community in the Urania, and examines her use of narrative strategies that revise the conventions of romance and affirm the resiliency of female characters.

Virginia Woolf's speculations in A Room of One's Own about the hypothetical fate of Shakespeare's unknown sister achieve unexpected relevance in the example of Lady Mary Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney's niece. Woolf muses that any woman born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century would never have been able to realize that gift as did a Shakespeare, or, one might say, a Sidney. Many feminist critics have used Woolf's reference to Shakespeare's sister as the starting point for their own analyses of women writers, particularly...