Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators in the English Renaissance

Oppositional Voices is a study of six women writers in the late Elizabethan period. Until the early 1980s it was generally assumed that women did not write any books during the Renaissance. Virginia Woolf wondered why, 'no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet'.
The women discussed in this book did write something of that 'extraordinary literature'. Ignoring Renaissance society's injunction that women should confin...