Shakespeare's Sisters

Ramie Targoff has written a vivid, finely crafted portrait of four extraordinary Renaissance women whose writing, long buried in archives, defied all the rules. Mary Sidney’s translations, Aemilia Lanyer’s poems, Anne Clifford’s diaries, and Elizabeth Cary’s dramas contained radical messages of autonomy at a time when women had few legal rights and almost no access to education. Raised to keep quiet and obey their husbands, these writers kept diaries, created female heroines, and gave women starring roles on the stage and page. Targoff, an esteemed scholar of Renaissance literature, restores these women to the starring roles they deserve in this fresh, galavanting, and indispensable history of Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s Sisters challenges and expands our historical memory in sweeping, cinematic prose. Scholarly storytelling at its finest. * Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath *
Over the past thirty years, scholars - mostly women - have recovered and celebrated the works of an array of long-forgotten female writers of the English Renaissance. Now Ramie Targoff has had the ingenious idea of telling the lives and exploring the works of some of them in an innovative group biography. She brings back to life and shares with a wider readership the literary talents of four women of varying backgrounds but equal fortitude. – Sir Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare scholar
A vibrant portrait …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. * Publishers Weekly *

With fluid prose, Targoff braids these four biographies to give an outstanding revisionist portrait of an age.
She catalogues the difficulties these women faced - from lack of education, to extreme poverty, to
obstreperous husbands - but the overall picture is not one, like Woolf imagined, of depression and madness.
Targoff’s re-written Renaissance is one in which women’s lives are not relegated; where their voices are heard
on the page.

Targoff, an American expert on Renaissance poetry and religion, shines an encouraging light on a quartet of talented female writers … Targoff’s book appealingly shows how her writers’ lives overlapped and is also strong on period detail

Ramie Targoff is Professor of English, co-chair of Italian Studies, and the Jehuda Reinharz Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of multiple books on Renaissance poetry and religion and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives with her husband and son in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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