SOURCE: "'A Sydney, though un-named'; Lady Mary Wroth and her Poetical Progenitors," in English Studies in Canada, Vol. XV, No. 1, March, 1989, pp. 12-20.

In this analysis of the Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, MacArthur contends that the absence of important Petrarchan conventions in Wroth's poetry functions as an assertion of the persona's feminine voice.

Critics have often commented upon the tensions in Lady Mary Wroth's prose romance The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (London, 1621), of which the sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus became a part. Carolyn Ruth Swift [in English Literary Renaissance, 14, 1984] has suggested that Lady Wroth was ambivalent, caught between her "empathy with society and her empathy with beleaguered women." Josephine A. Roberts [in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth] also finds ambivalence, which she claims surfaces in the stylistic unevenness of the sequence: "the poems as a group vary widely in quality, from those that merely repeat...