Shakespeare's Sisters
How Women Wrote the Renaissance
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- ¥730
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • This remarkable work about women writers in the English Renaissance explodes our notion of the Shakespearean period by drawing us into the lives of four women who were committed to their craft long before anyone ever imagined the possibility of “a room of one’s own.”
In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare’s England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-sixteenth century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the seventeenth century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England’s most infamous inheritance battles.
These women had husbands and children to care for and little support for their art, yet against all odds they defined themselves as writers, finding rooms of their own where doors had been shut for centuries. Targoff flings those doors open, revealing the treasures left by these extraordinary women; in the process, she helps us see the Renaissance in a fresh light, creating a richer understanding of history and offering a much-needed female perspective on life in Shakespeare’s day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Targoff (Renaissance Woman) delivers a vibrant group portrait of four women writers in Elizabethan England, most of whom were ignored or obscured for centuries but were "resurrected" by feminist scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries. She begins with countess Mary Sidney, who not long after compiling a posthumous volume of her famous brother Philip's work became a literary figure in her own right. A gifted translator, she began publishing her translations of French plays and poems in 1592 under her real name, an "unprecedented" move for a noblewoman. This allowed her work to be recognized after her lifetime, unlike fellow noblewoman Elizabeth Cary, whose authorship of the anonymous Tragedy of Marriam—a play about an ancient Jewish princess murdered by her husband—only came to light in France circa 1850 with the discovery of a biography written by her daughters. Rounding out the quartet are Aemilia Lanyer (born to a family of "middling gentry"), whose 1611 epic poem Salve Deus, a feminist retelling of Eve's fall and the crucifixion, wasn't reissued for another 360 years; and aristocrat Anne Clifford, whose diary (spanning from 1603 to 1676) was first published in 1923 by her descendant Vita Sackville-West. Targoff's narrative is full of vivid personalities and intriguing tales of court alliances and rivalries. It's an enlightening study of the era's literary scene and the women who persevered despite their exclusion from it.
