What would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say ...
... it takes little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered ... that she would have lost her health and sanity.
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf' held a grim view of women's writing during the age of Shakespeare, in large part because she was entirely unaware of just how many women were writing. Woolf was aware of a few early women writers, but she had no idea how many women actually were writing, because many of their works circulated in manuscript and were never published. Among the women she read about were seventeenth-century diarist and historian Lady Anne Clifford, the women of the French Salons, and Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. But others—women writing about love and heroic romances; women writing plays to be read and performed; women translating religious works—these she did not know of. As the exhibition explores the work of these women, from Mary Sidney and Laura Battiferri, and Louise Labé to Aphra Behn, it challenges Woolf ’s notion that women were unable to rise above their gender to create lasting works.
In recent decades, modern scholars have discovered or rediscovered many works that lay critically neglected for years. In the following pages, these scholars give their insights into the rich literary lives of the women who truly were Shakespeare's sisters.
Case 1: Lady Anne Clifford
Case 2: Elizabeth Cary
Case 3: Mary Sidney
Esther Inglis
Laura Battiferri
Case 4: Marguerite de Navarre
Case 5: Gaspara Stampa
Louise Labé
Lady Anne Southwell
Case 7: Lady Mary Wroth
Case 9: Women of the French Salons
Case 11: Katherine Philips
Margaret Cavendish
Case 12: Aphra Behn
Susanna Centlivre
Anne Finch
Case 13: Christine de Pisan
