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 Wroths pastoral romance The Countess of Montgomerys 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...