wroth

“Hackers will be watching this sentence to decide whether it’s wroth engaging in this kind of conduct,” Kosto said.

Immediately, she recognized it as the monogram cipher of Lady Mary Wroth, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s considered England’s first female fiction writer.

Wroth had also been party to a scandalous affair with her cousin, the third Earl of Pembroke, which she fictionalized in her two-volume romance, “Urania.”

Five years earlier, Braganza had seen a photograph of the cipher — which intertwines the initials of the fictional names Wroth gave herself and the earl — on the cover of a bound manuscript of one of Wroth’s plays, which Wroth had given to her lover as a gift.

Wroth’s personal library had been destroyed in a fire, with no volumes known to survive.