Moments That Make the Past Come Alive: A Guest Post by Ramie Targoff

Quiet talent comes to life in this fascinating portrait of four women writers honing their craft in Renaissance England, when women were still considered men’s property. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Ramie Targoff on writing Shakespeare’s Sisters.

When I was in college in the late 1980s studying English, I never read a single word written by a woman before Jane Austen. And, truth be told, I never even thought to ask how this could be. There were simply no women writers from the Renaissance being taught in ordinary literature classes at the time. We all took for granted that women from that era had sadly left no written traces behind.

 In the past few decades, we’ve rediscovered scores of women writers from Shakespeare’s England–poets, playwrights, diarists, translators, historians—many of whom were even published during their lifetimes, but then got swept away by the male-dominated canon. I started teaching classes on these women around fifteen years ago, and the experience of reading them with my students taught me how much we could learn —both from their writings and from their lives—about one of the most creative and interesting periods in our past. I was also struck, whenever I talked about these writers to friends in the wider world, how few knew anything about them. This is why I decided to write Shakespeare’s Sisters: I wanted to make the voices of these amazing women heard.

When I began my research, I spent a semester living in the UK, visiting all of the places the four central figures in the book had lived. Two of the women came from aristocratic families, and their homes were fancy castles or palaces open to the public today. At Ludlow Castle in Wales, I tried to imagine the young Mary Sidney climbing the treacherously narrow staircase to the top of the thirteenth-century tower or running through the imposing stone gateway across the moat; I conjured up Anne Clifford as a young bride wandering through the halls of the truly massive Knole House in Kent, whose lands extend out over a 1,000-acre park. One of the most vivid experiences I had was sleeping in Clifford’s own bed in the extraordinary Norman castle at Appleby that she inherited later in her life in the far northwest of England (the headboard was the original, with her initials carved in the wood, but the mattress had thankfully been replaced).

The biggest surprises for me, however, came not from my travels, but from the less glamorous sleuthing I did in the archives.  I will never forget opening a massive box–roughly the size of two large atlases–filled with documents at the Dickensian archives of the Chancery Court in London, and dust from the seventeenth century filled the air before me. It was inside that box that I found the testimony Aemilia Lanyer gave when she was suing her landlord in 1620. I had a similar thrill in the Bodleian library at Oxford when I got my hands on the original, handwritten journals that Lanyer’s astrologer/physician Simon Forman kept of their private conversations from 1597. These are the moments that make the past come alive for me, and I tried to bring as much of this fresh excitement as I could into the pages of my book.