Recovering women writers of the Renaissance
When Ramie Targoff teaches her women’s literature class at Brandeis, she begins with Virginia Woolf ’s long essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” paying particular attention to the section in which Woolf invents a fictional sister for William Shakespeare to describe the impossibility of a literary career for a woman in the Renaissance.
Woolf wasn’t entirely wrong, Targoff says: “It was incredibly hard to be a woman, period, let alone a woman writer, during the Renaissance!” But halfway through researching her own book about four English women writers of Shakespeare’s era, she found that Woolf had known of at least two of them.
“It came to me a little bit as a shock that she was burying some of the evidence,” says Targoff.
In “Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance,” Targoff profiles the lives and works of Mary Sidney, Aemelia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford, whose works of poetry, drama, and memoir illuminate not only their literary brilliance but also the world in which they lived.
“All of my understanding of what women’s lives were really like came from history books or from men’s representations of women,” says Targoff. “To start reading the women and learning about their lives, you realize what a hard path they had.”
All four women found their writing careers interrupted by events in their personal lives, from childbirth to widowhood. Worse, these four writers were themselves written out of literary history for centuries.
“Until I started working on these women, I had never read a single word written by a woman in the Renaissance,” says Targoff. “And that’s after two degrees in Renaissance literature.”
Targoff hopes the book will introduce these writers to a wider readership, and readers to a more expansive understanding of a time and place that included so many more voices than the ones we’ve studied for centuries.
“In my case I’m writing about women. As we know, people are recovering all kinds of voices – from different ethnicities, backgrounds, social positions and so on,” she says. “We’re changing what history looks like. And I’m honored to be a part of that.”