Jessica Swain

The Shepherdess in the Garden: Navigating the Routes of Female Mobility in the Urania Jessica Swain

This book seeks to show that the early modern pleasure garden in England may have been a cultural discourse that informed the portrayal of female subjectivity in Lady Mary Wroth?s pastoral romance The Countess of Montgomery?s Urania (1621). The space of the pleasure garden provides the setting for Urania to share her past experiences through the act of recollection. Through a digressive form of storytelling, narrative time expands in the enclosed, and therefore decidedly limited, space of the garden. Moreover, the similar and repetitive episodes which take place in pleasure gardens create a cyclical narrative pattern in the pastoral romance as a whole. In these episodes where time subsumes space in the gardens, Urania is able to develop her sense of identity through her retrospective narratives.