February 3–May 20, 2012
Monday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm
Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Free admission
Georgianna Ziegler, curator
This revelatory exhibition brings together the works of more than 50 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers from England and continental Europe, writing in formats that range from poems, prose fiction, and memoirs to translations, plays, and more. In all, scholars in recent decades have identified and studied hundreds of women writers from the early modern age.
Shakespeare’s Sisters takes its title from a famous passage in Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which Woolf imagines a gifted sister of William Shakespeare, completely thwarted by the social restrictions of his day. Drawing on the breadth and depth of the Folger collection, with additional rare materials from other institutions, Shakespeare’s Sisters presents a far more complex—and fascinating—reality.
