The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture. Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonstrates that girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult 'roaring girls' in city comedies. This monograph provides the first book-length study of the way the literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constructed the category of the 'girl'.

Original Scholarly Monograph

This remarkable work about women writers in the English Renaissance explodes our notion of the Shakespearean period by drawing us into the lives of four women who were committed to their craft long before anyone ever imagined the possibility of “a room of one’s own.” In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare’s England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-sixteenth century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men. Some readers may have heard of Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney, but few will have heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the seventeenth century to publish a book of original poetry, which offered a feminist take on the crucifixion, or Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman, about the plight of the Jewish princess Mariam. Then there was Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist who fought for decades against a patriarchy that tried to rob her of her land in one of England’s most infamous inheritance battles. These women had husbands and children to care for and little support for their art, yet against all odds they defined themselves as writers, finding rooms of their own where doors had been shut for centuries. Targoff flings those doors open, revealing the treasures left by these extraordinary women; in the process, she helps us see the Renaissance in a fresh light, creating a richer understanding of history and offering a much-needed female perspective on life in Shakespeare’s day.

Virginia Woolf, inA Room of One's Own, wrote: "Let us imagine. . .what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. . .as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was." What would it have been like if a woman had attempted to follow her brother's footsteps and travel to London to loin the theater and write plays? And what if it were she, not her brother Will, who had really written Romeo and Juliet? What was it really like to be a woman in Shakespeare's world? In this imaginative and wholly fascinating novel, we have the rollicking, humorous, and sometimes dangerous answer to those questions. InShakespeare's Sister, Doris Gwaltney has made Elizabethan society come alive, in all its glory and squalor, its speech, manners, and customs. And she has also forged a truly inspirational and touching story of a woman struggling to do what she loves-in a world where women were little more than the property of men, and if you wanted to follow your dreams, you had better be, or pretend to be, a man.

Virginia Woolf. The third chapter of Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own," based on two lectures the author gave to female students at Cambridge in 1928 on the topic of women and fiction. 36 pages. Tale Blazers.

A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.