Niece to Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke and eldest daughter of Sir Robert Sidney, also a poet, Lady Mary Wroth accomplished a series of original firsts for early modern Englishwomen writers. She wrote the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the first pastoral drama, Love's Victory, and, perhaps most sensationally, the first prose romance, The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621). With the charge of Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, that he and his daughter, Honora, and son-in-law, Lord James Hay, had been defamed in the episode of the cuckold Sirelius and his violent father-in-law, the printed first part of Urania, which included Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, was withdrawn from sale within six months. The Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta is one of the few North American locations which houses this rare first edition.

In all her writing Lady Wroth explores the brooding, inscrutable aspects of love and marriage. She was part of Queen Anne's intimate circle of ladies, performing in the court masques The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty. She also endured a decade-long unhappy marriage to Sir Robert Wroth (d. 1614), whose main interest was hunting not poetry. She bore three children: a son, who lived only two years, to Sir Robert Wroth, and a 'natural' son and daughter to her first cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. Her loss of favour at court coincided with the death of Wroth, her insecure financial situation, and scandal about the illegitimacy. There was no publication following the withdrawal of Urania.

Urania is an intricately quilted narrative, composed of simultaneous, overlayed and intersecting events and enacted by an epic cast of characters with their own sets of false doubles and antitypes. Behind diaphanous veils of fiction, characters often contribute to composite portraits of the members of Wroth's family circle. The dedicatee is her cousin's wife, Susan Herbert, Countess of Montgomery; the Countess made an independent decision about her very successful, secure marriage to Sir Philip Herbert. William Herbert, Wroth's cousin and lover, is portrayed in Amphilanthus ("he who loves both ways"). Manifestly unfaithful, he is linked romantically to a series of women as well as the long-suffering Pamphilia ("All-loving"), a reflection of Wroth herself. The sad shepherdess Urania is actually a lost princess.

The spectacular frontispiece, engraved by Simon van de Passe, pictures the narrative's central emblematic location, the Palace of Love. In one of the entrance-way towers of the Palace, depicted as more of a promenade than a fortified bridge tower, Urania is imprisoned until the end of the first book. In the passage excerpted here, an aged man, the priest of Venus, explains the architecture to the knights and ladies. The Palace is both an attraction and a potential prison. When the journeyers refresh themselves at the river, "Passions ... abound." Although Urania willingly accepts imprisonment because of her love for Parselius, this knight, by contrast, forgets about her and ultimately jilts her. Despite its fantastic architectural constructs, the amorous landscape of Urania is morally shifting and multidimensional.