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This chapter argues that one of the manifold uses of the relatively new form of prose fiction was as a vehicle to explore contemporary political problems, invariably setting the individual fiction in question in a distant land or a distant time. Sometimes this self-reflection is not sustained throughout a whole text, but exists as one of a number of functions of the writing, whether explicitly articulated or not. It also examines why writers of prose fiction dealt with political subjects, and why they often set their fictions in foreign settings. At times the motive undoubtedly was that of disguising potentially subversive material which could not be introduced into the public sphere directly, making the fiction a coded allegory—such is the case with Robert Greene's Givydonius. The Carde of Fancie (1584) and, in a slightly different manner, Mary Wroth's Urania (1621)—at others, the relationship between vehicle and message was reversed, the story affording the author/translator the chance to reflect on domestic politics. Elsewhere, authors tried to establish the novel as a more overt means of political reflection and satire: John Barclay's Argenis (1621; 1624) is the most obvious example. All three types owe much to the example of Thomas More's Utopia (1516; 1551), and that work's use of travel writing, set in Europe or the Americas, to combine political reflection and fiction. Through the selection of a series of pertinent examples rather than the problematic reconstruction of a sub-genre or ‘line’ within English fiction, the chapter shows how authors from the reign of Edward VI to that of James I performed literary experiments similar to More's.

This chapter discusses the story of Mary Wroth and explains how the dramatic increase in visibility of her story over the last two decades demonstrates the changes that have taken place in the status of early modern women's writing. It stresses that the attention given to Wroth establishes a certain canon of early modern women's writing, which is being challenged by many scholars working in the field. It demonstrates that Wroth is a model of aristocratic, literary writing, in distinction to many early modern women who wrote in non-literary forms and who came from more humble backgrounds. The chapter examines the rewritten lyric poetry created by Mary Wroth. It then evaluates Mary Wroth's enormous prose romance in more detail, particularly the scandal of publishing Urania. It also raises some questions regarding the textual history of Wroth's pastoral play Love's Victory.

This chapter describes the life of Mary Edmonia Lewis as a sculptor, and her expatriation to Rome. She trained as a teacher at Oberlin College, as an artist in Boston, and then taught newly freed slaves in Virginia. She was the epitome of the accomplished individual African American. In the nineteenth century, education was very important for the African Americans because it meant more than getting a good job: it also meant the right to be treated and considered as equal. Lewis first became interested in art in Oberlin College. Her first known work was probably a drawing of the muse “Urania,” given as a present to a friend. She left for Boston in 1864 and started a career as a sculptor. She also studied under Edward Bracket, but later left, probably because of her stereotypical Indianness attitude of transracial friendship. In 1865, she left for Italy to complete her education. It was here in Rome that Lewis fully considered herself a sculptor because it was in Italy where she saw and was influenced by many women artists. After her time in Italy, she once again returned to Virginia to teach freed slaves which she saw was a way of giving back to the community some of her good fortune.

Chapter three examines how artifice at its most conspicuous assigns an original set of values to the people and objects that populate imaginative worlds. Attending to the work of the epithet in Mary Wroth’s Urania, I argue that an indecorous poetics—one that manufactures stylistic surplus and excess—actively revises traditional hierarchies of value in order to generate an imaginative world that revels in the superlative degree. It may be, as Demetrius suggested in On Style, that using figures of speech to describe a wobbling teacup produces an indecorous alignment of words to things but such a use also distinguishes imaginative realms and their alternative constructions of possibility.

Following a set of characters who travel through the Urania while conspicuously withholding the names of their love objects, chapter six argues that periphrasis, that figure of speech which names an object by talking around that object, models a peculiar form of possession: Periphrasis is the figure that permits characters to maintain their grasp on precisely that which they do not have. While Wroth’s readers have tended to read her romance as a roman à clef, this chapter suggests that the Urania’s orientation towards history does not take the form of a topical allegory but a circumlocution. Periphrasis becomes the instrument by which Wroth’s fictional world brings about precisely that which history denied.

This chapter examines the Irish dimension of the bi-monthly (later tri-annual) periodical Urania (1916-1940) through a focus on the influence of Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926). Gore-Booth’s editorial vision and writing for Urania conveyed a radical message about gender and sexuality: ‘sex is an accident.’ On its pages, Urania assiduously collected a hidden history of lesbians, transsexuals, and intersexuality and advanced a transnational, cross-cultural critique of gender norms, gendered performances, and compulsory heterosexuality. Urania initially sought to broaden its appeal by supporting votes for women, but remained more intent on serving as a ‘queer archive’ dedicated to dismantling gender norms and documenting women’s past and present examples of transsexuality, intersexuality, cross-dressing, and lesbianism. In its remediation of the global press, Urania also constructed a composite, feminist portrait of a society free of gender essentialism and heterosexual normativity. The journal was affiliated with the Aëthnic Union, a small, radical organisation founded in 1911.

In this chapter I argue that Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania signals the enduring legacy and triumphant return of constant women as the cornerstone of the Sidney alliance and its mode of political critique. Rather than a personal roman-a-clef, I see the Urania as a sustained romanticization of the unions of states in the service of a larger political cause: the “Holy Roman Empire” as a figure for the international Protestant cause. Deploying a genre rife with clandestine literary operations to offer advice to the man most associated with a “clandestine opposition” within James’ Privy Council—her cousin and lover William Herbert—Wroth endeavored to ensure that he was doing so with sufficient constancy. In ciphering these contexts so explicitly, Wroth identified herself and her romance with the workings of oppositional statecraft, and thus with the political humanism for which the Sidneys were known.

Wonder, which was always at the heart of romance, came under attack in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and the nature of imaginative fiction changed. Yet, Don Quixote (the two parts of which were printed in 1605 and 1615) shows that the wonder was not eliminated under the pressures of fact in the fictions of the early seventeenth century; it simply resurfaced in other forms. Two texts roughly contemporaneous with Don Quixote’s appearance in England illustrate the nature of that metamorphosis: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and the manuscript continuation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. This chapter examines the self-conscious use of the implausible and the improbable that both texts display, and argues that the wrinkles and flaws that Shakespeare and Wroth insist on displaying in their texts are integral to the metamorphosis of wonder itself.

Although not every lyric produced in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was intended to be sung, unpacking the musical facets of lyric circulation holds tremendous implications for our understanding of the performance-based facets of early modern poetics. In confronting these questions, this chapter takes as its focus the literary–musical nexus of the Sidney circle and, in particular, the writings of Mary Wroth, an accomplished musician whose writings abound with musical lyrics and allusions to song performance. Focusing on the manuscript collection of Wroth’s poems now preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library and on the songs scattered throughout Urania, this chapter considers how reading Wroth’s songs as songs—as metrical compositions written with a tune in mind, adapted for musical setting and performance, or simply meant to be imagined as sung—sheds new light on the affective impact of the musical moments in her writings.