January 15, 2024
Historian Targoff (Renaissance Woman) delivers a vibrant group portrait of four women writers in Elizabethan England, most of whom were ignored or obscured for centuries but were “resurrected” by feminist scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries. She begins with countess Mary Sidney, who not long after compiling a posthumous volume of her famous brother Philip’s work became a literary figure in her own right. A gifted translator, she began publishing her translations of French plays and poems in 1592 under her real name, an “unprecedented” move for a noblewoman. This allowed her work to be recognized after her lifetime, unlike fellow noblewoman Elizabeth Cary, whose authorship of the anonymous Tragedy of Marriam—a play about an ancient Jewish princess murdered by her husband—only came to light in France circa 1850 with the discovery of a biography written by her daughters. Rounding out the quartet are Aemilia Lanyer (born to a family of “middling gentry”), whose 1611 epic poem Salve Deus, a feminist retelling of Eve’s fall and the crucifixion, wasn’t reissued for another 360 years; and aristocrat Anne Clifford, whose diary (spanning from 1603 to 1676) was first published in 1923 by her descendant Vita Sackville-West. 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.
