"What did it take for a woman in Renaissance England to enter the overwhelmingly male world of literature?" This is the central question decisively answered in Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff, the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities and co-chair of Italian Studies at Brandeis University.
The study is a captivating and revelatory look at the long-neglected literary output of English women writers of the Renaissance, writers often thought not to have existed at all. But here are four in exquisite detail: Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford, all demonstrably writing in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
The women shared several qualities that afforded them this role: not only literacy, of course, which was a feature of relative affluency (or adjacency to it), but also access through a male figure close to them. For example, Sidney's literary career began with the death of her accomplished brother, whose work she finished before moving on to translation and poetry. Cary, too, began her literary production as a translator of work written by men. Lanyer, Clifford's one-time tutor, wrote the first "country house" poem, while Clifford became "the most important female diarist of the era."
Targoff (Renaissance Woman: The Life of Vittoria Colonna) treats readers to the vibrant complexity of the time with all its intrigue, perilousness of social jockeying, and the issues women took up while writing. It's a singularly entertaining and insightful work of literary history as well as an illustration of how such history is richer and more interesting when everyone who has contributed is recognized. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.