The Countess of Montgomery's Urania

[1] Initially, it was written for the enjoyment of Wroth's family circle, and could have been composed, in part, at the home of William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, in London.

[5] Anthony Munday's English translation of Amadis de Gaule, published in 1618 and 1619, may have also been a major source for Wroth.

On 4 June 1621 the printer and publishers were fined for the publication of Motto; Marriott and Grismand spent some time in Marshalsea, and were released on 10 July, three days before entering Urania into the Stationers' Register.

Matthews may have been confused by Wroth's abrupt midsentence ending of Urania, and left the remainder of the final page blank, perhaps in the hopes that he would eventually receive material to complete the volume.

The content-specific nature of the title page is unusual for the time, and may signal Wroth's intention to publish Urania.

The title page's design and dedication resemble those of the Arcadia, and indicate Wroth's attempt to insert herself into the family literary canon.

[11] Given the specificity of her corrections in her own copy of Urania, Wroth probably intended to have her work printed, though she may not have personally instigated the process through direct contact with publishers.

The work contains over a thousand characters, and spirals into hundreds of subsidiary plotlines, which are interspersed with Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.

The work is largely centred on the relationship between Queen Pamphilia and Emperor Amphilanthus; their meetings are surrounded by storylines involving their various siblings, and many other tertiary characters.

[14] In genteel society, an unmarried woman of the time was expected to be chaste, silent, and obedient and this theme is reiterated throughout contemporary religious works, legal treaties, and literature.

[15] By writing a text intended for a public audience, critics like Andrea claim that Wroth was acting against the accepted ideals of the established patriarchy and so calling her own moral character into question.

She is actually the biological offspring of the daughter of the King of Naples, and comes to this realization over the course of the work through a series of pastoral songs and sonnets with the shepherds.

The two published responses to Urania in the 1620s favour the work and associate Wroth with the Sidney family's literary canon.

Henry Peacham, in the 1622 The Compleat Gentleman, names her “an inheretrix of the Divine wit of her immortal Uncle” after reading Urania.

In 1624, Thomas Heywood includes Wroth, along with her aunt Mary Sidney, in Gynaikeion: or, Nine Books of Various History Concerning Women.

Later in the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish references Wroth and her works in “To All Noble, and Worthy Ladies,” in her 1664 Poems and Phancies.

[21] Virginia Woolf correctly claimed that any woman who composed a work of fiction during the period of the Renaissance would be "thought a monster".

[23] After her altercation with Sir Edward Denny, Wroth wrote to George Villiers, claiming that the work was published against her will and that she had already made efforts to stop it from being sold.

The most well-known of contemporary reactions to Urania was Sir Edward Denny's, who responded intensely to what he perceived as his negative representation in the novel.

There is no extant evidence of any marital troubles between James and Honora, but Hay was occasionally in conflict with Wroth's brother Robert, during which he proved to have a violent temper.

[25] Denny retaliated against Urania's implications by circulating his own satirical poem about Wroth, in which he labels her a "hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster."

Denny returned a letter to Wroth on 26 February 1622, in which he intimates that her book has been largely condemned by the court, and urges her to turn toward translating psalms in the manner of her "virtuous and learned aunt" Mary Sidney.

[32] Other signs that the manuscript is unfinished include incomplete plot lines and blank spaces to fill in either characters' names or poems.

This anti-Muslim sentiment is corroborated by a general reassertion of European aggression toward Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, founded on the Ottoman Empire's encroaching deeper into Europe.

In a 2015 essay, Sheila T. Cavanagh, a professor at Emory University, proposed an online, crowdsourced classroom edition of Urania.