An examination of Pamphilia, the cynosure and central character of the Lady Mary Wroth's romance Urania, shows to how great an extent her author appears to have internalized the Renaissance ideal of womanhood with its insistence on chastity above all, then silence and obedience. On the other hand, Wroth's women characters also embody glimmerings of new kinds of political, poetic, and persuasive powers just becoming available to women as well as men. Pamphilia suppresses her impulses to power or disguises them as something more acceptable; she keeps her most extreme transgression, her writing, very private. Other women, like Nereana, who try to exercise undisguised power, are usually presented as eccentrics who risk public shame, punishment and even insanity. Pamphilia, however, for all her conventional perfections, finally subverts the ideal in another way: she carries the patriarchal ideal of feminine virtue to fiercely independent extremes. Lady Mary Wroth published The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, a long but unfinished prose romance, in 1621. Almost immediately objections to its publication were raised by Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, who fancied that he saw himself and his family's private affairs pilloried in the episode of Seralius and his father-in-law, and the book may have been partially suppressed.' A continuation, which follows the heroines and heroes of the romance into the next generation but also is without formal ending, exists only in a single holography copy held by the Newberry Library. Josephine A. Roberts, editor of Wroth's poems, is presently at work on an edition of both parts of the romance; meanwhile the text of the published Urania is available from Brown University's Women Writers Project.2 Seminars, conference papers and publications that comment on it have begun to appear.3 The earliest published reaction to the Urania, when critics noticed it at all, was to dismiss it as an impoverished derivative of Sidney's Arcadia,4 but recently scholars have realized that the ways in which the niece's romance is different from her uncle's are significant, and have begun to disagree in interesting ways about how Wroth's work may best be understood. Gary Waller, in the 1977 introduction to his edition of her sonnets, emphasizes its Jacobean anomie, the "disillusioned amorality, where betrayal, loss, and infidelity are accepted with resignation as inevitable," in contrast with the moral tone and conventional romance closure of the Arcadia.5 Josephine Roberts agrees with Waller that the Urania depicts a court life "rife with corruption and villainy," but claims that the important difference from the Arcadia is its intense focus on love to the virtual exclusion of conventional romance heroics.6 Comparing the two Renaissance romances has begun a continuing interest in Wroth's text as the voice of a woman writing about woman's experiences. Lyn Swift and Elaine Beilin both have claimed that Mary Wroth holds conservative