Wise and worthier women: Lady Mary Wroth's 'Urania' and the development of women's narrative

This study reads Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania (1621) in the context of Renaissance court culture and the development of women's narrative to explore the structures of negotiation patterning Wroth's text, structures that reveal a pattern of female authority in women's emerging voice within patriarchy. In Urania, Wroth rewrites the structures of court narrative to reproduce the patterns of male authority in female form, expanding the courtly male ethos to define for the woman writer an ethos of her own. Read alongside the courtly narratives that inscribe Woman as supplement within the aristocratic ideology, Wroth's text defines a pattern of female authority constructed within an ethical framework of aristocratic ideals. Inverting Petrarchanism and overturning romance heroism, Wroth reproduces the patterns of the courtly male ethos to rewrite the ideology of femininity that silences female desire, reinscribing that desire within an ethical frame of discretionary narrative and so authorizing it: Urania structures female authority as the "/" that defines female silence in the desire/duty paradigm, thus renegotiating the patterns of femininity and authority within court culture. Wroth's narrative strategies give shape to this ethical framework, authorizing female desire and marginalizing the reader to (re)read court culture.;Read alongside the novels of eighteenth-century women writers, the pattern of female authority in Wroth's narrative links her text to the development of a female narrative tradition. Eliza Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Frances Burney's Cecilia and Camilla, all reveal similar patterns of female authority, negotiating the traditional definitions of femininity that locate women within patriarchy. The pattern of protest/containment underlying these early modern women's narratives begins to define a female tradition of narrative and a pattern of reading Woman within patriarchy that is still evidenced today in studies like Janice Radway's Reading the Romance.