Frye traces the ways in which this was especially true for the Sidney family, and suggests that this context informs the role of textiles in the
Urania. The Sidney's involvement in the trade in luxury textiles, the sumptuous cloth that comprised the decor at Penshurst, and engravings by Simon de Passe of Mary Sidney Herbert and the title page to
Urania, all indicate a deep connection that textualities had to genealogy for Wroth's family.
"Bolina was a woman who dared to say what no other woman of her time was saying," claims Christopher Nissen in this compellingly argued apologia of Giulia Bigolina, a sixteenth century "literary innovator" and "defender of women" (2) who, with her romance,
Urania, challenged the greater authorities of her time by pioneering a new way to look at the interfaces between women, beauty, art and literature: "What
Urania dares, Bigolina dares" (229).
Her most ambitious work,
Urania, published in 1621, with an unpublished continuation in manuscript, is now much studied.
The same might be said for the
Urania Cottage project, the Home for Homeless Women, that Dickens himself set up and managed on behalf of Angela Burdett Coutts.
Vargas Llosa invents and develops
Urania according to the way in which Trujillo actually treated women, according to a number of historical sources.
Urania Cottage is mentioned three times, once as a refuge for "homeless women," and twice as a home for "fallen women." The double ending of Great Expectations is discussed twice.
A case in point is the first essay, "Osiris and
Urania." Rajan plucks the myths of Osiris and
Urania from the classical past and reshapes them as metaphors for the difficulty of Milton's work and the divine inspiration essential to its completion.
When a chance encounter reunites Hattie with her estranged foster brother, Jonnie, she confounds Dickens by choosing to leave
Urania Cottage to live in relative poverty with Jonnie.
When she finally gets a positive reply to her potboiler "Lady
Urania" from a London publisher, Theo (Sam Neill), she hightails it up to the big city, convinced that success and recognition are her birthrights.
Her paternal grandparents are the late
Urania and John L.
