This nonfiction work explores the lives and writing of four little-known but impressive women writers in Renaissance England. Mary Sidney is probably the best-known of the four. Her brother was a writer and her writing was, during stretches of time, attributed to him. But she did plenty of her own writing, including an English translation of the Psalms that includes feminist imagery and commentary. Aemelia Lanyer was the first women to publish a book of original poetry. She, unlike the others in this book, was not of the aristocracy. She was married to a court musician. Elizabeth Cary published the first original play by a woman in England, a play about the Jewish princess Mariam, which again has feminist undercurrents and a strong female title character. And Anne Clifford wrote extensive diaries that were more than just an accounting of her household duties, they include her thoughts and interactions with others.

In addition to discussing the writings of these women, Targoff writes about their marriages, inheritances, and lack of freedom. The book has tons of interesting information. And yet, I was really confused a lot of the time. The layout was strange. Targoff alternates chapters between the four women, but she does it in chronological order of the main events she discusses, so the women aren't discussed evenly. And for whatever reason, I had a really difficult time distinguishing them from each other and remembering who had written what.

Even upon immediately finishing the book, I would not be able to regurgitate or discuss most of it. I came away with some overarching impressions - that there were, in fact, women writing and writing well during the Renaissance, and also that their writing was surprisingly feminist. But something about the topic or the writing or the layout just made it really hard to connect the dots for me.

I think I'd still recommend this if you're interested in the era or topic, but I'd do so with some reservations. ( )

Elizabeth I’s funeral procession in April 1603 was lavish and long, the extravagant bier topped with a wax effigy of the queen in red wig, crown and all. Thousands watched the procession as it moved from Whitehall to Westminster, and within or around it were four female writers who would change Renaissance literature in England.

The purpose of Ramie Targoff’s book is to belie Virginia Woolf’s claim, made centuries later in A Room of One’s Own, that it would be impossible for a woman of that time to be a serious writer; if Shakespeare had had a talented sister, Woolf said, she would surely have gone mad and died by suicide in the face of overwhelming obstacles. But Woolf was wrong. While only Shakespeare was Shakespeare, there were ‘sisters’ of considerable literary skill (albeit ones with aristocratic connections).

One of them was in Elizabeth’s funeral procession: Mary Sidney. Perhaps best known as the dedicatee of her brother Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, by the time of the queen’s funeral Mary Sidney had a growing reputation due to her own sophisticated and experimental poems, most of them based on psalms. She had also published her translations of her brother’s French writer friends, most notably Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine, the first dramatisation of the Antony and Cleopatra story in English and a probable source for Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

Peripheral to the procession, but connected to it by participating relations, were the three other women whose lives and work Targoff describes. Aged 13, Anne Clifford was judged too young to participate, but her mother, Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, was among Elizabeth’s aristocratic mourners. Clifford’s diaries and autobiography are filled with tremendous strength of purpose revealing her struggle for her rightful inheritance. Then there is Elizabeth Cary, whose father-in-law marched as Master of the Queen’s Jewel House. Her two closet dramas, Mariam and Edward II, were written during an unhappy marriage and feature strong women standing up to powerful men. Finally, Aemilia Lanyer was a member of the minor gentry, whose husband Alfonso was part of the royal recorder consort. Her single book of poems, published in the same year as the King James Bible (1611) and including the story of Christ’s passion told entirely from a woman’s point of view, took 400 years to enter the Renaissance literary canon, but it is unlikely to leave any time soon, partly because the poems are simply very good.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com

Susanne Woods is the editor of The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer and author of Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford University Press, 1995 and 1999).