SOURCE: “Rewriting Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 295-310.

In the following essay, Miller discusses Wroth's reversal of the traditional gender roles in the classical sonnet form.

Near the end of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Lady Mary Wroth's poet-speaker contrasts the “true forme of love” in her thoughts with those “ancient fictions” that conjure shapes from the stars.¹ During the English Renaissance, male sonneteers wove discursive fictions around the lady as the object of love, often following the example of Astrophil's addresses to his Stella. Even as Wroth makes deliberate reference to “olde fictions” of Arcadia in her prose romance, Urania, in order to differentiate her narrative from that of her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney,² so she rewrites...