The Essay: Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf

The Essay: Women Writers to put back on the Bookshelf

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf: Lady Mary Wroth

Lady Mary Wroth

Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Women Writers to Put Back on the Bookshelf, Lady Mary Wroth

The English Renaissance poet whose reputation at court was ruined by her writing.

New Generation Thinker Nandini Das looks at the scandal caused by the 350,000-word prose poem The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and its depiction of women in love.

Author of the first prose romance published in England in 1621, her reputation at court was ruined by her thinly veiled autobiographical writing.  Visit the family home, Penshurst Place in Kent, and you can see Lady Mary Wroth's portrait, but New Generation Thinker Nandini Das says you can also find her in the pages of her book The Countess of Montgomery's Urania which places centre stage women who "love and are not afraid to love." Scandal led to her withdrawing it from sale and herself from public life.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

New Generation Thinkers champion five early and overlooked female writers of fiction.

Five New Generation Thinkers champion early and overlooked female writers who have, nonetheless, made an important contribution to the history of fiction.

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