Fictionalizing Shakespeare’s Sisters: Mary Sidney Herbert

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagined that if Shakespeare had had a sister equal in talent to his, she would have been “so thwarted and hindered” that she could not have written her own poems and plays, let alone seen them published or performed. Woolf ’s own imagination as a novelist takes over the discursive essay form in her detailed account of the life of the invented Judith Shakespeare, whose frustration at the obstacles facing a woman “born with a gift of poetry in the sixteenth century” led her to despair and suicide. Of course, we now know that Woolf was wrong — some women authors in Renaissance England defied the era’s constricting morals and mores and found space and recognition, but also scandal and censure. Woolf did not know about these authors, because over time they had been erased from the canon of accepted classics. Twenty-first-century literary critics and scholars of early modern women’s studies realize that Woolf ’s compelling observation reflected that absence of knowledge in 1929, when she published A Room of One’s Own. Even today, for much of the reading public, that lack of awareness persists. Contemporary readers of historical fiction have missed out on an inspiring array of women’s voices that were heard in their own period, but then silenced. The historical fiction series I am working on, titled Shakespeare’s Sisters, seeks to redress that imbalance for