- Title
- Me and my shadow: editing Wroth for the digital age
- Creator
- Salzman, Paul
- Relation
- Re-Reading Mary Wroth p. 183-192
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137473349_12
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- In 1978, I was a miserable, homesick, cold graduate student working in Cambridge on a PhD that my supervisor considered to be absurd, unfinishable, and unexaminable. (“Just not a Cambridge PhD,” he kept telling me.) In the course of doggedly reading all the prose fiction written in the seventeenth century, I had come across Mary Wroth’s Urania, which I treated initially as nothing more exciting than yet another romance indebted to Sidney’s Arcadia. The great attraction of Urania was that King’s College had a copy of it, so that I could read it far more easily than the numerous works I had been reading on microfilm, and usually negative microfilm at that. I also read the manuscript continuation of Urania in a copy kindly supplied to me by Katherine Duncan-Jones. The price for that was being inadvertently caught in the middle of one of many disputes between Duncan-Jones and Peter Croft, the irascible librarian at King’s, who disagreed about everything, including whether or not the Urania manuscript was in Wroth’s hand. In an example of what I would now refer to as distracted reading, I seized on the idea that Urania contained allusions to Jacobean scandals, something that had been noted by the sparse existing critical commentary on Wroth’s romance from the DNB, Brigid McCarthy, and, in a brief 1975 piece by Graham Parry. Reference was made to the exchange between Wroth and Edward Denny over the depiction in Urania of Denny’s family scandal involving his daughter Honora.
- Subject
- Mary Wroth; poetry; English poetry; literature
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1354111
- Identifier
- uon:31208
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781137479624
- Language
- eng
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