A review of Shakespeare’s Sisters by Ramie Targoff

For resurrecting women in a whole section of literature: Ramie Targoff’s Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Riverrun, 2024) is a blast of feisty fresh air into the annals of the history of Renaissance literature. As Targoff explains in her epilogue, even after she had spent ten years studying for a Bachelor’s in English at Yale and for a PhD in Renaissance Literature at Berkeley, she hadn’t encountered a single woman writer from the Renaissance. This passionate work crosses swords with Virginia Woolf who told Targoff in A Room of One’s Own that no woman could ever have been a writer in Shakespeare’s England. In response, Targoff intersplices the lives of poets Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, playwright Elizabeth Cary, and diarist Anne Clifford, so we can finally see the Elizabethan age through the eyes and words of contemporaneous women. I wish (so much!) I had thought up Targoff’s final sentence: ‘The future of the past is full of women.’ Drop the mike.

Available to buy at Shakespeare's Sisters by Ramie Targoff | Waterstones