W eamys, A nna

Anna Weamys ( fl . 1650–51) was the author of A continuation of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia (1651), one of three extant printed sequels to Sidney's prose romance and the only one written by a woman. Little information on Weamys's life and work exists outside the Continuation (whose title page represents the author only as ‘Mrs A. W.’), but according to the volume's prefatory materials, she was young, unmarried, and well‐connected in Royalist literary circles when she wrote. Weamys was an educated gentlewoman, possibly the daughter of Dr Ludowick Weames (d.1659), a Church of England clergyman from Essex. Patrick Cullen (1994) suggests a birth date of around 1630. The date of her death is not known.