Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: A Re-appraisal

In this first full-length study of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the first sonnet sequence to be written and published by an English woman, Ilona Bell shows that Mary Wroth is a boldly original lyric poet. Bell compares the handwritten private manuscript to the printed text, and shows how Wroth refashioned herself to conceal an earlier, more transgressive, private poetic persona. By exploring interpretive clues provided by Wroth's romance Urania, Bell sheds new light on the links between Wroth's life and writing. Bell traces how Wroth re-conceptualized the private poems of her father Robert Sidney and the influential sonnets of her famous uncle Philip Sidney. Ultimately she discloses that Wroth's innovative use of poetic convention reinterprets and reconfigures male literary tradition and challenges paradigms about early modern English women writers that have erroneously separated them from their continental counterparts. Since Wroth's lyrics exist in her own handwriting, as well as in books printed during her lifetime, they comprise a rare and valuable source of information about the ways in which Renaissance lyrics were composed, compiled and read in manuscript, and re-construed in print. Bell shows that Wroth's private poems are individuated, impassioned, suspenseful, dramatic, and unprecedented for an early modern English woman writer"the opposite of how they are generally seen. Bell finds Wroth's printed poems far more intriguingly inventive when read as an attempt to reconstruct and conceal her private lyric persuasion from the public. Bell's ground-breaking analysis shows that Wroth's poetry is less transcendently Petrarchan and more Donnean, less abstractly universal and more fully embodied, less predictable and conventional, more open to shifting, contradictory meanings.

Ilona Bell is Professor of English at Williams College, USA