Romance Prose and Responses

Early modern perceptions of women readers of romance shaped the romances women wrote. While cultural anxieties about erotic arousal never entirely went away, the genre of romance developed less morally threatening forms with the influence of newly translated Greek romance, which was in turn incorporated into the French heroic romance circulating widely in England during the mid-seventeenth century. This entry discusses romances written by five seventeenth-century women: Mary Wroth’s Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Anna Weamys’s Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda, Margaret Cavendish’s Assaulted and Pursued Chastity, and Bridget Manningham’s Rivall Friendship. Since each writer adapted the genre of romance circulating in her time to express her specific concerns, these five romances provide significant insights into these women’s perspectives on sexuality and gender as well as into their individual acts of authorship.