Read: “My Journey to Wilton House”

Two women. Two centuries. One remarkable story.

Deep in the archives of Wilton House, the ancestral home of the Earl of Pembroke, a young scholar makes a discovery that could define her career: literary fragments written by seventeenth-century noblewoman Lady Mary Wroth, niece of the famed Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney. Against her mentor’s advice to focus on the male canon, she embarks on the thrilling task of piecing together Mary’s story—a woman who defied societal dictates that women remain “chaste, silent, and obedient.”

Through heartbreak, family tragedy, scandal, and the constraints of her time, Mary fought to tell her story and shape her own destiny. As the scholar edits these fragments, her own journey unfolds in footnotes and commentary, revealing a parallel path toward independence, courage, and self-confidence.

Wilton House is a layered, lyrical exploration of female voices across the centuries—a tale of resilience, intellect, and the enduring quest for freedom in a world that too often silences women.

“A layered literary journey in the mode of A. S. Byatt, with the researched detail of Hilary Mantel, Wilton House is a delightful imagined life of Lady Mary Wroth—whose life and work we'd all know better if the world were just. Here, Wroth is resurrected in three dimensions, as both writer and woman, in a novel as much mystery as it is a saga of love and loss and grit.”—Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers and I Have Some Questions for You

“Meticulously researched and lyrically written, Daly’s novel welcomes the reader into the whirling world of Elizabethan and Jacobean England: its joys, sorrows, fashions, politics, and betrayals. Lady Mary Wroth leaps from the page and demands to have her story heard—a story, we discover alongside our metatextual narrator, that still has so much to teach us. Once I entered the world of Wilton House, I didn’t want to leave.” —Allison Epstein, author of Fagin the Thief and A Tip for the Hangman

“Upon finishing Wilton House, I blinked in utter disbelief to find that I was not, in fact, living in the seventeenth century. A world composed entirely of fragments hasn’t any right to be this vivid, but Daly pulls it off masterfully. The sensation of peering at history simultaneously from within and without is like nothing I’ve read before.” —Sarah Miller, author of Marmee and Caroline