Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, is among the overlooked great female writers of the 17th century.

Renaissance Women

A new book spotlights four forgotten female writers who were contemporaries of Shakespeare’s but cut out of history

By Ramie Targoff

When I began working on my book Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, my aim was to bring attention to a group of Renaissance women writers who defied the conditions that Virginia Woolf described in A Room of One’s Own: “Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”

It turns out Woolf was wrong. As I eventually learned, there were some women writers who managed to publish their own works and live reasonably healthy and happy lives during the Renaissance. But they were long out of print and forgotten by the time Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own. She couldn’t have known anything about Shakespeare’s female contemporaries because no one had bothered to remember them—or so I thought.