The Portrait of a Woman Poet in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilantus

Abstract

Lady Mary Wroth is considered to be one of the most prominent women writers of the Early Modern Period. She comes from the Sidney family, the members of which are well-known with their noteworthy literary accomplishments. Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus has a significant place among the sonnet sequences and early modern women’s poetry as it is “the first sonnet sequence to be composed by an Englishwomen” (Roberts, 1982, p. 43). The Petrarchan tradition with its determined roles of a male poet and an idealized lady, along with its blazons employed to express the consequences of unfulfilled love and desire can hardy accommodate a woman who comes up with such an unaccustomed role. This article, therefore, aims at a study of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, as a sonnet sequence to see how a woman poet manages to employ the sonnet tradition in her own way. How Wroth as a woman poet accommodated herself and her persona to the poetic tradition of the time will be the main point of argumentation. It is in this respect that, the focus will be on Pamphilia and how she is represented with a new role. She is depicted as a woman with a voice, talking about her experience and the destructive outcomes of grief, quite often questioning the nature of love. Pamphilia appears not as the silent object of some other poet’s work, but writing her own poems, metaphorically redefining her place in the literary production. Furthermore, Wroth’s choice of genre, how she employed and revised it, the role she assigned to the female speaker, the major themes, along with her ideas on writing as a woman poet will be further elaborated on.