Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Lady Mary Wroth” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth was the daughter of Robert Sidney, later Earl of Leicester, and the wealthy heiress Barbara Gamage, first cousin to Sir Walter Ralegh. Robert Sidney was himself a poet. Mary spent much of her early childhood at the house of Mary Sidney, Countess of Montgomery. In 1604 Mary was married to Sir Robert Wroth, a wealthy landowner in favour with James I. Although the marriage was not a happy one, Wroth’s favour with the king brought Lady Mary into court circles. For some time Mary Wroth had been the mistress of her first cousin William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, with whom she had two illegitimate children, a son and a daughter.

In 1621, Lady Wroth’s prose romance The Countess of Montgomeries Urania was published. In Urania, drawing partly on court events, scandals and personalities, Wroth relates the love story of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, which she uses as a framing-story for a large number of tales about female characters married to unsuitable husbands or matched with unfaithful lovers. Urania takes love as its main theme and the prose is interspersed with poems, printed at the end as a sonnet sequence in the first edition. Wroth’s interest is the idea of fidelity, and the double standard erected by men around its practice. Pamphilia knows that Amphilanthus, her lover (they are not married), has the capability to be faithful, and she also insists, which is novel, that he must learn to be faithful in order to be worthy- of her. The other characters (and there are quite a few) play out variations of the same theme. What also makes the work interesting is that the women are consciously searching for their own identities, which they perceive as being apart from the men in their lives; the book opens, for example, with Urania in search of herself—she is aware that she is not re-ally a shepherdess, but she does not know who she is beyond that.

Urania caused great controversy because of its purported similarities to actual people and events. In particular, Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, charged Wroth with slander. He wrote two angry letters to her and attacked the work in a poem. She also wrote an unpublished play, Love’s Victory, and some poetry. Of her later life virtually nothing is known or recorded, the scholarly consensus being that her reputation was permanently besmirched by Urania’s notoriety and that she must have kept a low profile.