It is hard to know how many readers the Urania had in the seventeenth century. Although Wroth promised the Duke of Buckingham after the Denny scandal that she would attempt to recall copies, there is no evidence of whether this happened. The fact that the work was never reprinted might suggest relative obscurity; but, on the other hand, twenty-nine copies are known to survive today, which is not a bad number; only around twenty surviving copies are known of each of the 1590 and 1593 Arcadias, for instance. We do know of one woman who certainly owned and therefore probably read Wroth's romance: as mentioned before, one copy is three times inscribed ‘Dorothy Long her booke’. Another woman, herself an experimenter with the romance genre, at least knew about the row Wroth's publication caused. Lord Denny had directed Wroth to ‘Work oth[er] Workes leave idle bookes alone / For wise and worthyer women have writte none’. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in a preface to her own first publication, Poems, and Fancies (1653), complained that men