SOURCE: "Feminine Self-Definition in Lady Mary Wroth's Love's Victorie," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 171-88.

In the following essay, Swift studies how Wroth's belief that women should have freedom of choice regarding marriage and the direction of their lives finds expression in her tragicomedy Love's Victory.

In her pastoral play Love's Victorie, Lady Mary Wroth created a feminine dreamworld analogous to the "masculine dreamworld" that Renato Poggioli [in his The Oaten Flute] finds in traditional Renaissance pastorals. As male authors retreat to Arcadia in protest against sexual conformity and responsibility, in Love's Victorie a female author retreats to a world in which women can enlarge their freedom by overcoming family pressure and marrying as they wish. In seventeenth-century England an aristocratic woman usually married a man her parents chose for her because of his status or wealth; in Love's Victorie one woman chooses to remain...