Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (review)

Mary Wroth is the most remarkable of all the early modern women writers who have been gradually returning to view after centuries of neglect. She is now part of the early modern canon, and Margaret P. Hannay's scholarly biography is the final publishing event that confirms canonical status. It follows the editorial labours of the late Josephine Roberts, who published an edition of Wroth's poems in 1983, and an edition of Wroth's massive prose romance Urania in 1995 (Part I) and 1999 (Part II). Hannay's critical biography both confirms Wroth's importance and also adds to our growing knowledge of the Sidney family: Wroth was the niece of Philip and Mary Sidney (Hannay has also written the definitive biography of Mary).

The biography of Wroth is wide-ranging and includes a valuable quantity of information about Wroth's family - not just on her father's famous Sidney side, but also on her mother Barbara Gamage's side, which becomes important given that her mother's connections were more powerful than the Sidneys, even if less distinguished. Hannay's meticulous research underlines the fact that, while Wroth stressed her Sidney heritage, especially within her literary endeavours, the 'cultured and literate Welsh family' (p. 6) on her mother's side must have had a significant effect on Wroth's sense of importance.

This is a literary biography and Hannay reads Wroth through her writing, and her writing through her sense of Wroth's life. Any biography of Wroth has to be rather lopsided, as we have a reasonable amount of information about the first thirty years of her life, but very little direct information about the last thirty. Hannay makes judicious use of what information she has been able to glean, and much of the time this richly detailed book has to rely on contextualizing Wroth, with a certain amount of speculation about what she may have been doing or thinking. While grounding biography on many 'ifs' and 'maybes' is potentially problematic, Hannay is always conscious of where speculation begins and ends, and her detailed knowledge of the Sidney family and the general literary and historical context is put to good use. There are some wonderful glimpses of Wroth as a child, thanks to the extensive correspondence between her father and his secretary Rowland Whyte, which Hannay has previously edited along with Michael Brennan and Noel Kinnamon (a resourceful team who have brought primary Sidney material to a wide scholarly audience).

Hannay pays due attention to Wroth's marriage to Robert Wroth, an unhappy event famously described by Ben Jonson: 'My Lady Wroth ... is unworthily married on a jealous husband'. Wroth's marriage and her affair with her cousin William Herbert, with whom she had two illegitimate children, are worthy of Hannay's attention not merely as titillating facts in a fascinating life, but because Wroth's feelings about marriage, thwarted love, and female desire are present in so much of her writing, especially in her poetry and in some of the semi-autobiographical passages in Urania. Hannay judiciously notes that negotiations for the marriage probably began when Mary was only thirteen and therefore unlikely to offer much resistance even if the match was unappealing. Hannay also balances the generally negative portrait of Robert Wroth with a caution against seeing him as simply jealous and boorish, even in his shadowed representations within Urania.

This is an excellent example of how Hannay always approaches Wroth's writing with a sophisticated notion of how it might be illuminated by biographical information, but never dominated by it. Hannay is also able to provide a wealth of information about the activities of those closest to Wroth, particularly her aunt Mary Sidney, and her close friend Susan Herbert, Countess of Montgomery, the dedicatee of Urania, who was married to Philip Herbert.

Hannay provides a detailed account of the now quite famous story of Wroth's publication of Urania in 1621 and the subsequent controversy...