Lady Mary Wroth

Abstract Lady Mary Wroth actively experimented with formal categories of lyric poetry, particularly libel, complaint, sonnet, and song, in the pursuit of poetic virtuosity as well as Protestant political and religious programmes. She drew upon the Sidneian familial networks of which she was part, and broader humanist and vernacular traditions of poetry, in order to embed her works in both male and female-authored coterie cultures and poetic traditions. The poetic exemplarity that Wroth aimed for was recognised by her contemporaries and evidenced in the extent to which her works were read, enjoyed, and recirculated in her lifetime and beyond. Substantial, difficult, and dazzling, her poetry redefines the horizon of expectation for women as writers in the seventeenth century, and makes a significant contribution to the development of poetic mode, genre, and form in Jacobean literature.