Ovid and Women's Pastoral in Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victory

This paper seeks to place Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victory within the context of Ovidian pastoral. Unlike the pastoral models offered by Virgil or Theocritus, which have been suggested as templates for Wroth's play, Ovid's portraits of withdrawal and separation from civil society often focus on women. Ovid's pastorals also emphasize that the topics of courtship and marriage that feature so prominently in Renaissance pastoral can imply sexual anxiety and even danger for women. This paper argues that Wroth's engagement with Ovidian models of female community challenges trends in the recovery and reconstruction of her authorship by feminist scholarship.