Lady Mary Wroth - women writer to put back on the bookshelf
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2020
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing. Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.
If you are interested in more discussions about women writers you can find an Arts & Ideas podcast episode called Why We Read and the Idea of the Woman Writer which includes a discussion of both Anne Bronte and Anne Dowriche. And there is a collection of programmes about women writers on the Free Thinking programme website
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.2 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | Hello, I'm Claire Walker Gore. |
| 0:39.1 | Thanks for downloading this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast, |
| 0:42.6 | which is part of a short series looking at women writers to put back on the bookshelves. |
| 0:47.6 | Nandini Das is a new generation thinker on a scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council |
| 0:53.6 | to turn academic research into radio programmes. |
| 0:57.2 | She studies Renaissance literature at the University of Oxford, and her essay puts the case for dipping into the writing of Lady Mary Roth. |
| 1:04.9 | It was the winter of 1621. In England, James I was on the throne, and gossip at court was all about a book that had just been printed in London. |
| 1:16.9 | Over in continental Europe, Cervantes had just published the second part of his Don Quixote, |
| 1:23.4 | the story of the man from La Mancha driven mad by reading too many stories, which now we often |
| 1:29.2 | think of as the first modern novel. England would have to wait almost a century before what we |
| 1:36.0 | now recognise as novels really emerged. But the book that caused all the buzz in King James' court |
| 1:43.1 | not only predates those by over a hundred years, |
| 1:47.5 | it was also written by a woman. |
| 1:50.2 | The first woman, in fact, ever to publish an original work of prose fiction in English, |
| 1:57.0 | 190 years before Jane Austen, 226 years before Charlotte Bronte. |
| 2:04.8 | This is the story of Mary Roth, daughter, courtier, lover, writer, and her book, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, a huge, sprawling, moving story of love, adventure, and heartbreak. Like |
| 2:22.9 | Cervantes, Roth had based her narrative on a much older form of storytelling, the romance, |
| 2:29.1 | full of the adventures of knights and ladies, quests and magic. Unlike Cervas, however, Mary Roth was meant to be a consumer, not a producer. |
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