A review by charlottereadshistory
Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Ramie Targoff's Shakespeare's Sisters is an important look at the lives and works of four women writing at the same time as Shakespeare in Renaissance England. Readers may be aware of Mary Sidney who was a poet, but may not have been aware of Elizabeth Carey the playwright, Anne Clifford the diarist or Aemilia Lanyer the poet. And you wouldn't be remiss if you didn't, as until the 1990s nearly all texts by women Renaissance writers were either unpublished, out of print or their authorship was obscured in some way. So far, so patriarchy. 

Targoff's work is fairly chronological, and takes a biographical look at what we know of these women's lives, what they wrote and how they appeared in print to others who knew them or knew of them. 

Aemilia Lanyer's story and poetry was especially interesting as she was from the middling classes - connected to the royal courts by way of her musical family. 

I also found it fascinating that all four women used their writing to present and centre the experiences of women and even to put forth feminist views in defence of women's rights - I loved a particular passage from Lanyer's Salve Deus:

You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; 
Your fault being greater , why should you disdain Our being your equals, free from tyranny?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book - it wasn't overtly academic or taxing but was full of hugely important and absorbing information. It's genuinely  exciting to think of what other gems historians and archivists will uncover now there's a field of history dedicated to women and their exploits - as Targoff says, "the more of these voices we can uncover, the richer our own history becomes. The future of the past is full of women." 

The publisher sent me an advanced reader copy of this book for review but all opinions are my own.