The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth.

It is a great boon to all Renaissance scholars who want to attend responsibly

to the writing of early modern women in their teaching and research, to have available at last in paperback Josephine Roberts' splendid edition of Wroth's poems (1983). Lady Mary Wroth is the most prolific, most self-conscious, and most impressive female author in England before the Restoration. Niece to Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, and daughter to Sir Robert Sidney of Penshurst, she consciously constructed herself as heir to the formidable Sidney literary legacy, taking over and revising their Elizabethan genres to the purposes of a female speaker and the cultural practices of the new Jacobean era. Her published work includes the first sonnet sequence by an Englishwoman, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (103 sonnets and songs), with a female lover-poet as speaker; it was appended to her prose romance, also a first for an Englishwoman, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621, 558 pages, including more than fifty poems). Her unpublished work includes a very long but unfinished continuation of the Urania, a few additional poems and letters, and a pastoral drama, Love's Victory, with many poems.

Josephine Roberts' edition contains most of Wroth's poems, published and unpublished, scrupulously edited and introduced. It is not quite a complete edition because, regrettably, Roberts did not rework the section of poems from Love's Victory using the complete and more accurate version in the Penshurst manuscript (edited by Michael Brennan, Roxburghe Club, 1988); instead she reprints the selection based on the incomplete Huntington manuscript. This means that the poems from Acts I and V of the drama are not included, and the text and textual apparatus for all the Love's Victory poems cannot be regarded as authoritative.

Roberts has however given us an authoritative text for all the rest of Wroth's known poems--over 180 of them. She has chosen, appropriately, to use the holograph manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in the Folger Library as copy-text since it shows the author's accidentals and corrections; for the Urania poems she uses the 1621 printed text and the unique Newberry manuscript of the unpublished Part II. Roberts has supplied exactly what is needed in a scholarly edition of an author virtually unknown until recently: an account of the manuscripts and printed editions for Wroth's entire canon, not only the poems; a careful description of Roberts' judicious textual procedures (with textual apparatus and notes); a biographical sketch which surveys most of what we know about Wroth and its sources; an impressive critical essay on Wroth's poetry (sources, themes, stylistic characteristics); illuminating critical notes; and plates illustrating Wroth's hand in the manuscripts. Sensibly, she also includes a brief account of Wroth's other writings, and, in a valuable appendix, the fascinating exchanges of letters between Wroth and several contemporaries in regard to the scandal surrounding her satiric treatment of Sir Edward Denny in the Urania.

In the decade since this edition was first published in hardcover, Wroth has attracted a good deal of critical attention. Some of this work makes advances on Roberts' interpretations, but much of it has been based on and made possible by her edition. In the paperback edition Roberts has made over a dozen textual changes based on the discovery of another copy of the Urania with handwritten authorial corrections. Scholars can rejoice that Roberts will soon publish a scholarly edition of both the published and unpublished Urania, making Wroth's largely inaccessible romance also available to us.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY