"Shakespear's Sisters" does not mean Shakespear's actual family, but we could say sisters in spirit, in other words, woman writers roughly of the same period. This engagingly written, at times vivid and image-rich academic work rewarded slow reading. Absolutely solid with primary source grounding and quotations, the book examines the lives and work of four women, and their impact on the evolving scene of English literature.

It's especially interesting to see these various ways the modern novel was beginning to bud. Fiction of course has been around for a long time. Chaucer being a fine example. But the evolution, particularly with respect to the twists and turns of English history--the puritan era--is an absorbing subject in itself.

It's all there: early publicity (coffee houses, broadsides) plays, women writing plays, fictional autobiography, education of women, translating across languages, balancing the inner life of the writer with that of a woman of the times, and her obligations. Targoff's book is well worth having in hardback, so that one can reference its stellar notes.

The title caught my attention but actually reading it did not. Unfortunate but true. It came across as dry reading, with a lot of quotes to provide context. But they seem rather to overwhelm the text, to the point of distraction. I wish I could have liked it, but I didn't.

Thanks to NetGalley for access to this advanced copy, which I voluntarily reviewed.

In A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Virginia Woolf wrote that if Shakespeare had a sister, she wouldn’t have been able to pursue writing. Instead, she would’ve been trapped by society’s expectations and eventually driven mad.

With all due respect to Woolf, Ramie Targoff and her fascinating nonfiction work sheds light on the real women in Renaissance England who DID pursue writing despite the limitations of their patriarchal society.

Tariff brings to light the lives of four Renaissance women (including the first woman in England to publish original poetry, the first woman to publish an original play, and even more trailblazers) who have been passed over on the historical record. They lived and wrote despite (and sometimes because of) harsh patriarchal norms, personal losses, national conflict, and religious discord.

For the most part, their writerly spirits were sustained by personal wealth and class privilege. It also begs the question… How many other female writers across time have been lost to history due to their gender AND class?

I was completely fascinated by SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS and it’s inspired me to view the Renaissance in an entirely different light. I had never heard of any of these women before, but their stories deserve attention, space, and study. (They also have more plot twists than most novels!) Thankfully, this book is around to create a fuller (and deliciously richer) perspective on this era and I HIGHLY recommend it!

I’ll leave you with the author’s final words on the subject which have inspired me as both a book lover and an aspiring female historian: “We can hear their words and learn their lessons, and the more of these voices we can uncover, the richer our own history becomes. The future of the past is full of women.”

(*Please note this is from an ARC and the final version is subject to change.) Thank you to the publishers for an early copy!

This book invites readers to journey from Queen Elizabeth’s lavish coronation to the lives of four remarkable women writers in a time when women lacked legal rights. While Mary Sidney is relatively well-known, Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman to publish original poetry in the seventeenth century, remains obscure. Elizabeth Cary’s groundbreaking play and Anne Clifford’s defiant diary showcase their resilience against patriarchy. Balancing familial duties and artistic pursuits, these women defied societal norms and carved out literary spaces where none existed before.

This book is fascinating, well-researched, and beautifully written. It lacks a narrative arc, so it feels like a recitation of facts more than a story. The text is dense, without breaks to allow readers to gather their thoughts. Context and connections are lacking, which I found disorienting. For instance, I didn’t really understand why the funeral of Elizabeth I was described in so much detail. The material is interesting, but I continually had the sense of “Why are you telling me this?” Hopefully the published version will have better transitions than the ARC.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

I received an electronic ARC from Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor through NetGalley.
Targoff introduces readers to four English female writers from the Renaissance. Each chapter focuses on a different one of the women as they moved through life and established their writing styles. You won't find the works they wrote in this book but you will see their background and history. The challenges they faced make it even more amazing that they were able to create and that at least some of their writings survived. The author provides detailed accounts of each woman's life and how they were connected to the English courts of this timeframe. By studying their lives, readers develop a clearer understanding of the customs and limitations faced. It's a testament to these women that they were able to achieve what they did. The Epilogue refers to several other women writers from this time frame and to the painfully slow process of including them in the canon.
Well worth the read and I'm glad I took time to read and reflect on each chapter before moving forward. Extensive notes are included at the end of the book.

If you're looking for an introduction to the world of Renaissance England through women's eyes and how they worked to make their voices heard through writing- look no further than Shakespeare's Sisters by Ramie Targoff. She takes the long-held belief that Tudor women didn't read, didn't write, and certainly weren't anything but meek and mild wives and daughters and throws it out the window.

Queen Elizabeth might not have been trying to break the glass ceiling for women, but that doesn't mean other women weren't looking for ways to express themselves. Mary Sidney is someone readers might have heard of- at least because her brother was famous. She took that and ran with it, adding translations and poems of her own to published works of his (some that she only recently got credit for!). Aemilia Lanyer was the first woman to publish a book of original poetry in the 17th century, and she did it while worrying about money for her family because she wasn't nobly born! She made it more shocking by writing a feminist take on the crucifixion- including a poem from the point of view of the wife of Pontius Pilate arguing that if he condemned Christ he is basically erasing Eve's original sin and women are no longer the 'lesser sex'. Elizabeth Carey was the first woman to publish an original play, a feminist take on the Jewish princess Mariam. Anne Clifford is probably the first woman diarist who also wrote down her life and her family's history, all while fighting 40 years of legal battles for her inheritance.

Each of these women were ahead of their time in so many ways, determined to live life as they wanted to. This incredibly well-written and well-researched book gives them back their voices and introduces us to women we may not have known before, but will now definitely want to know more about. The book is designed to tell us more about their lives than to be literary analyses, but at the end we get a great chapter on why their writing is so rarely taught, where we can find their books, and other Renaissance women we might want to read.

I absolutely recommend Shakespeare's Sisters to anyone interested in Tudor England and English literature, or the increasing discoveries of women's lives throughout history, some of which are only recently being brought back into the light.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Interesting to read about the women who wrote literature and poetry during the Shakespearean era. Very little was known about these women before now. Well-written.

I have often commented on the fact that there is not enough representation regarding female writers, and this book illustrates that point. Author Ramie Targoff introduces readers to four incredibly gifted, unrecognized women (to me, at least; serious scholars may be well acquainted with them.) Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford were brilliant, talented women living and writing in the shadows of men, glimmering like fireflies amid the darkness of the expectations of their times. They were met with recognition when their work was published, and for some years after, but they have been lost to history, and perhaps would have remained so if not for Ramie Targoff. This is not a book for the casual reader; it is an epic history of some of literature's most accomplished minds, a book meant to be explored and savored. It is a fantastic book; Targoff keeps her readers engaged as she educates them, and I for one was not bored at all despite the length of the book. I have already recommended Shakespeare's Sisters to friends, and encourage anyone interested in women's literature, and literature in general, to read this book.

Lovely informative non fiction story about a female perspective of life during the time of Shakespeare. It was fascinating and insightful and never was dull or dry. Beautifully written and researched

Thank you so much for the ARC in exchange for my honest review, would read anything Targoff writes!

A fascinating book about women in the 16th and 17th centuries, one of my favorite periods to learn about. I love anything Shakespeare related so this was very interesting! With so few women able to have rights or power of any kind in this era, it is nice to read about how they lived in such a difficult period.
Many of these figures I did not know anything about so it was a refreshing read if you enjoy history.

Great read for those interested in some of England female writers from the 17th century. This book explores 4 of those women.
One of the best written nonfiction historical readings I have come across. I found it to be well researched and gave a good glimpse into the lives and barriers these women faced in that time period.

I would recommend this to anyone wanting to know more about female authors and would also recommend to College and High School Honors Literature classes. This book could promote excellent conversations for students.

The end of the book contains additional information regarding further readings of work done by these women.


Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced E-book edition in exchange for my honest review.

This book is set to release March 12, 2024

Women were writing in the renaissance even though history didn’t discover that until recently. Their work was either overlooked or ascribed to a male contemporary. The shear amount of research that went into this volume is amazing and enlightening. The stories of four women in the 1500 and 1600s translating some works and creating original works of poetry, plays, novels, and history is inspiring when considering that women were not normally educated to read and write and limited to what they were allowed to do or own or say. The lineages of the characters and their relationships to each other were confusing since so many families married into each other over the centuries but the information in this book is invaluable.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alfred A Knopf Publishing for the ARC to read and review.

Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff tells the stories of Mary Sidney, Amelia Lanyer, Anne Clifford and Elizabeth Cary who were writers of poetry and plays. A nonfiction in depth telling of each lady and her life. On occasion, the details given were too much and bogged down the stories. It was good to hear their stories because women authors did not happen in Renaissance England. Thank you to NetGallery and Knopf for letting me read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Chronology of the female writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book shows the hardships that female writers endured. Some had to put their work in a male relative's name in order to be published.

A thrilling look at the women of Shakespeare's era. I found the Elizabeth chapter most useful and used it with my students for our fall play which featured on Queen Elizabeth. This is a must read for any Tudor or Shakespeare fan. Highly recommended.

It seems as though a gazillion books (give or take a few) have been written about Elizabethan England, but this one intrigued me because it explored a subject new to me, female writers. Author Ramie Targoff says in her Epilogue that she went all through her studies in English literature, including a PhD, without reading any literature by women written during the time of Shakespeare. Because of this, her book is important as a work of research as well as very entertaining reading. Targoff sets the scene with Queen Elizabeth I, reminding readers of the broad points of her life, but then concentrates the rest of the book by focusing on four extraordinary women: poet Mary Sydney; Aemelia Lanyer, whose book of poetry offers a distinctly (and surprising) feminist viewpoint; Elizabeth Cary, the first published female playwright in England, and Anne Clifford, a diarist whose work helped save her own inheritance and chronicle the lives of her family. Although most of the narrative is about the work of these writers, there are several quotes from each one to give us a sense of what wonderful artists they were.

Targoff's style is very readable, but like most books about English history, the relationships and lineages are often difficult to follow. I've read several books about this time period, but these women all came from a slightly lower tier of nobility than others I've read. Some of the women's relationships intersect, others do not. It didn't help that Targoff chose to alternate chapters between the four women rather than telling the complete story of one and then moving on to the next. I can understand the choice, but for me, the complete stories would have worked better.

Extensive notes and bibliography are included, making this book an excellent choice for college level English classes, but is accessible and entertaining for the lay person as well.

Many thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this advance reader copy.

Very informative story of women writers who were ( roughly) Shakespeare contemporaries during a time when women were discouraged from writing, much less publishing. The author explores the backgrounds and writings of 4 specific women and while it sometimes veers off into some quite academic details, mostly a good read for those who are not familiar with this period of women’s literary history

Shakespeare's Sisters is an incredibly passionate and empathetic biography of four English women authors, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford. Even though all these women overlap chronologically, they could not be more different in their chosen medium, personal lives, or temperaments. While there are several amazing women authors from the period that Targoff did not touch on, her choices of who to include demonstrate the sheer breadth of content in this field. We start with Sidney's massive collection of Biblical poetry but ultimately end up with Clifford's relentless and calculating legal campaign, with a quick detour into the absolute insanity that is Elizabeth Cary's one-woman campaign to revive Catholicism. There is plenty to enjoy in this book even if you aren't looking for very technical literary analysis of their works.

I really liked the chronological layout of this book, since it emphasized how interconnected these women were, as well as how much they reflect this period in English history. It did make it confusing, however, when we don't see Sidney and Lanyer for large periods of time. Overall, I would recommend to anyone interested in women authors, Renaissance literature, or even those just craving some juicy Early Modern gossip.

Readers are warned that this is not a book of literary criticism about the works of Renaissance writers, rather it is about the lives of four writers that led relatively well-documented lives. And author Ramie Targoff intends to show us not that these women were exceptional, but to describe their everyday lives, lives that would have been familiar to many women in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain.

Even forewarned, I was a bit disappointed not to learn more about the works of the women (Anne Clifford, Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Aemilia Lanier. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources cited throughout and in the bibliography.

By looking at four women of roughly the same generation, Targoff shows that women writers were not as rare in Shakespeare's day as we might have assumed, and that their lives can be seen as unexceptional, and therefore it's possible, even likely, that more women might be discovered to have been writers.

(Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital review copy.)

Courtesy of Knopf Publishers and Netgalley, I received the ARC of Shakespeare's Sisters by Rami Targoff. This well researched work on women writers in Renaissance England provided a fascinating look into the era of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare. The four women highlighted were poets, playwrights, and diarists, in addition to being wives and mothers. This book emphasizes their persistence, fearlessness, intellectual abilities, and religiosity. They defied the current standards and did not write for glory or acclaim...truly feminists!