...Lady Mary Wroth: A New Voice Lady Mary Wroth’s voice arises out of a culture that did not want to hear what she had to say because of her gender. She was a female in a male’s world. Regardless of this predicament, Lady Mary Wroth wrote and had published The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Love’s Victory and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Her sonnet series, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was the first English compilation of poetry to be written by a woman. In the male dominated world of Petrarchan love sonnets, Lady Mary Wroth creates a place for herself by manipulating the Petrarchan tradition of a male speaker and replacing it with the voice of a female, with both female and male characteristics. This produces poetry that flips the Pertrarchan tradition inside out, because by defying the rules of society, Lady Mary Wroth brings attention to herself and gives insight into autonomy and the tension between genders during the Early Modern period. Lady Mary Wroth existed in England at a time when women were expected to be silent and obedient. In fact, in “Lady Mary Wroth and Women’s Love Poetry”, Naomi Miller mentions that “letters that document the Court Furor indicate that Wroths’s gender, her choice of genres, and her social position outside the inner circle of power rendered her authorship unacceptable” (196). Wroth’s family was extremely literary, her father was a poet and she was the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney, both of who wrote. Her father’s poems were only stumbled...
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