Blackwell Reference Online

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Anna Weamys ( fl . 1650–51) was the author of A continuation of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia (1651), one of three extant printed sequels to Sidney's prose romance and the only one written by a woman. Little information on Weamys's life and work exists outside the Continuation (whose title page represents the author only as ‘Mrs A. W.’), but according to the volume's prefatory materials, she was young, unmarried, and well-connected in Royalist literary circles when she wrote. Weamys was an educated gentlewoman, possibly the daughter of Dr Ludowick Weames (d.1659), a Church of England clergyman from Essex. Patrick Cullen (1994) suggests a birth date of around 1630. The date of her death is not known. A continuation of Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia follows a model begun by Lady Mary Wroth in her self-consciously imitative Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621) and extended in the two other explicit responses to Sidney's pastoral masterwork: Gervase Markham's The English Arcadia, alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydney's ending (printed in two parts, in 1607 and 1613), and ‘A sixth book to the countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia’ by Richard Beling (appended to the 1627 text of the Arcadia ). Romance was a literary form that, by its nature, deferred endings and invited sequels, and the first edition of Sidney's work (1590) ended in mid-sentence, as if inviting other authors ... log in or subscribe to read full text