Women's History Month - guest post by Shana Worthen
Dr. Shana Worthen is a historian of medieval technology. She's published articles on the iconography of windmills, and on Lynn White, jr.; and teaches for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, although she lives in the UK. Eating tasty and thought-provoking food is a favorite hobby. She's helping to organize Loncon 3, this year's Worldcon, which you should all come to.
The first published English novel by a woman was written by Lady Mary Wroth. She also is the first Englishwoman known to have written a complete sonnet sequence. And she wrote at least one five-act play. Her accomplishments are impressive!
I first consciously heard of her when I moved near to where she had once lived, and started reading up on locals. How could I not be interested in fantastical literature written by a seventeenth-century woman?
Niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Wroth is usually referred to by the surname gained through her unhappy marriage rather than her maiden name, which was the same as her famous aunt's married name. She was well connected on all sides of her family. Her mother, Glamorganshire heiress Barbara Gamage, was Sir Walter Raleigh's first cousin. Her father, Governor of Flushing as a result of his service in the war against Spain, was made Earl of Leicester in 1618. She hung out in Queen Anne's court. Ben Johnson dedicated The Alchemist to her, and praised her writing.
I almost bought some of her writings at the Medieval Congress at Leeds a few years ago, but Gillian beat me to the one copy they had. Despite being foiled by her promptness, she's also why I've finally read large swathes of The Countess of Montgomeries Urania. Committing to write this post ensured I finally got my own copy.
And so I've been reading the convoluted tales within tales of the relationships among the sprawling cast of the novel. Of Urania's crush, and then her first real love, which is erased by being thrown from a magical rock into the ocean, so she can be reused in a new romance. Of Pamphilia, "loyallest lady" to her often-unrequited object of affection, Amphilanthus, as she carves poems - but never his name - in trees. Of faked deaths. Giants. Lots of fallen royalty living sadly in caves. Travel by magical little boats. Travel by shipwrecks. One despairing lover mistaken by an unrelated despairing lover for a goddess. New friends promising to put each other back on their rightful thrones. Almost everyone is royalty of some sort or other. Of the nearby Mediterranean and eastern Europe as a surreally fictional places, despite being written about in a time when English knowledge of the rest of the planet was increasing so rapidly. Lots of people compose poetry. One woman is cured of her bad poetry by water immersion.
I haven't even mentioned yet the periodic magical enchantments which capture various combinations of lovers in their toils. The frontispiece illustrates one of them, the Throne of Love in Cyprus, whose captive lovers must await the arrival of the "valiantest knight, with the loyallest lady".
The affordable abridged version which I'm reading also has wonderful summaries of the excised sections. My favorite thus far, and indicative of the narrative's convolutions: "The group gets on Parselius's ship bound for Italy, only to find it occupied by pirates. The courteous pirate captain Sandrigal knells to Urania, whom he mistakes for Antissia, the lost princess of Romania, committed to his care ten years earlier for a sea voyage to Achaya....". (p. 57) [Parselius is Pamphilia's brother. Antissia, who shows up elsewhere in the narrative, is also in love with Amphilanthus; she's also the one later cured of her bad poetry. Sandrigal is killed shortly after telling his story.]
This edition also has a family tree. And a map. (The characters collectively visit most of the places on the map.)
Pamphilia is an authorial stand-in, of sorts, as Amphilanthus is of William Herbert, Wroth's lover, and brother of Mary Sidney. Urania, erstwhile shepherdess and eventual Queen of Naples, is a stand-in for Mary Sidney. Many of the numerous relationships in the text echo and rework aspects of Mary Wroth's own life: her unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth, a Verderer of Epping Forest, in west Essex; her ongoing passion for her aunt's brother, who fathered the two children she had after her husband's death.
I have managed to write of her thus far with scarcely a word which she herself wrote. She wrote in eager phrases, lengthy series of them joined together into sentences; and in tightly-edited poetic verses, which occasionally appear, as written by one of the characters.
Here, then, is a brief example of travel by shipwreck:
"At last they were quite carried out of the gulf and, being in the Adriatic Sea, the ship was tossed as pleased destiny, till at last she was cast upon a rock and split, the brave ladies saved while she awhile lay tumbling and beating herself, as hoping to make way into the hard stone, for those who could pierce the stoniest heart with the least of their looks." (p. 126)
The shipwreck has brought them to another enchantment, the enchantment of the Theater, where they rapidly end up lured in by glorious music and trapped. It's just another day in the extremely eventful lives of four of the main characters.
Urania was published in 1621, a roman-à-clef that scandalized many of her contemporaries, both because she was a woman and because of some peoples' suspicion that particular fictionalized episodes were libelous representations of themselves. While Wroth formally distanced herself its publication, the book had her name all over the title page (relatively speaking) and she wrote a sequel, albeit one which was not published until the twentieth century.
Much less is known about her life after the Urania controversy. That, plus debt, plus alienation from court life, perhaps thanks to her affair, led to greater obscurity. She left fewer traces in the surviving paperwork as she aged; but at least she kept her lifelong passion for writing.
Urania, Book 2, ends mid-sentence, breathlessly looking forward.
The first published English novel by a woman was written by Lady Mary Wroth. She also is the first Englishwoman known to have written a complete sonnet sequence. And she wrote at least one five-act play. Her accomplishments are impressive!
I first consciously heard of her when I moved near to where she had once lived, and started reading up on locals. How could I not be interested in fantastical literature written by a seventeenth-century woman?
Niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, Wroth is usually referred to by the surname gained through her unhappy marriage rather than her maiden name, which was the same as her famous aunt's married name. She was well connected on all sides of her family. Her mother, Glamorganshire heiress Barbara Gamage, was Sir Walter Raleigh's first cousin. Her father, Governor of Flushing as a result of his service in the war against Spain, was made Earl of Leicester in 1618. She hung out in Queen Anne's court. Ben Johnson dedicated The Alchemist to her, and praised her writing.
I almost bought some of her writings at the Medieval Congress at Leeds a few years ago, but Gillian beat me to the one copy they had. Despite being foiled by her promptness, she's also why I've finally read large swathes of The Countess of Montgomeries Urania. Committing to write this post ensured I finally got my own copy.
And so I've been reading the convoluted tales within tales of the relationships among the sprawling cast of the novel. Of Urania's crush, and then her first real love, which is erased by being thrown from a magical rock into the ocean, so she can be reused in a new romance. Of Pamphilia, "loyallest lady" to her often-unrequited object of affection, Amphilanthus, as she carves poems - but never his name - in trees. Of faked deaths. Giants. Lots of fallen royalty living sadly in caves. Travel by magical little boats. Travel by shipwrecks. One despairing lover mistaken by an unrelated despairing lover for a goddess. New friends promising to put each other back on their rightful thrones. Almost everyone is royalty of some sort or other. Of the nearby Mediterranean and eastern Europe as a surreally fictional places, despite being written about in a time when English knowledge of the rest of the planet was increasing so rapidly. Lots of people compose poetry. One woman is cured of her bad poetry by water immersion.
I haven't even mentioned yet the periodic magical enchantments which capture various combinations of lovers in their toils. The frontispiece illustrates one of them, the Throne of Love in Cyprus, whose captive lovers must await the arrival of the "valiantest knight, with the loyallest lady".
The affordable abridged version which I'm reading also has wonderful summaries of the excised sections. My favorite thus far, and indicative of the narrative's convolutions: "The group gets on Parselius's ship bound for Italy, only to find it occupied by pirates. The courteous pirate captain Sandrigal knells to Urania, whom he mistakes for Antissia, the lost princess of Romania, committed to his care ten years earlier for a sea voyage to Achaya....". (p. 57) [Parselius is Pamphilia's brother. Antissia, who shows up elsewhere in the narrative, is also in love with Amphilanthus; she's also the one later cured of her bad poetry. Sandrigal is killed shortly after telling his story.]
This edition also has a family tree. And a map. (The characters collectively visit most of the places on the map.)
Pamphilia is an authorial stand-in, of sorts, as Amphilanthus is of William Herbert, Wroth's lover, and brother of Mary Sidney. Urania, erstwhile shepherdess and eventual Queen of Naples, is a stand-in for Mary Sidney. Many of the numerous relationships in the text echo and rework aspects of Mary Wroth's own life: her unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth, a Verderer of Epping Forest, in west Essex; her ongoing passion for her aunt's brother, who fathered the two children she had after her husband's death.
I have managed to write of her thus far with scarcely a word which she herself wrote. She wrote in eager phrases, lengthy series of them joined together into sentences; and in tightly-edited poetic verses, which occasionally appear, as written by one of the characters.
Here, then, is a brief example of travel by shipwreck:
"At last they were quite carried out of the gulf and, being in the Adriatic Sea, the ship was tossed as pleased destiny, till at last she was cast upon a rock and split, the brave ladies saved while she awhile lay tumbling and beating herself, as hoping to make way into the hard stone, for those who could pierce the stoniest heart with the least of their looks." (p. 126)
The shipwreck has brought them to another enchantment, the enchantment of the Theater, where they rapidly end up lured in by glorious music and trapped. It's just another day in the extremely eventful lives of four of the main characters.
Urania was published in 1621, a roman-à-clef that scandalized many of her contemporaries, both because she was a woman and because of some peoples' suspicion that particular fictionalized episodes were libelous representations of themselves. While Wroth formally distanced herself its publication, the book had her name all over the title page (relatively speaking) and she wrote a sequel, albeit one which was not published until the twentieth century.
Much less is known about her life after the Urania controversy. That, plus debt, plus alienation from court life, perhaps thanks to her affair, led to greater obscurity. She left fewer traces in the surviving paperwork as she aged; but at least she kept her lifelong passion for writing.
Urania, Book 2, ends mid-sentence, breathlessly looking forward.