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.¹ 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.² 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 the general reader. Interestingly, just as Woolf's own encounter with patriarchal restrictions as a woman author, far from silencing her, led her to write A Room of One's Own and forge ahead as a novelist, the early modern women authors I treat in the series are themselves akin to Woolf: they, too, wrote and published despite gendered restrictions.

Most novels about Renaissance women picture them in relation to powerful men; one immediately thinks of the many novels about the six wives of Henry VIII. In other work, I have already identified this "Noah's ark approach" in critical studies of women authors, which position them in direct relation to already canonical or culturally powerful male figures.³ I observed with a disturbing sense of déjà vu how closely the publication of historical novels about Renaissance women follows the same pattern. By contrast, my series proposes to bring these remarkable women authors to the attention of a wider reading public. Shakespeare's Sisters comprises six interrelated historical novels that capture these women's stories from their own perspectives.⁴ These are not fictionalized biographies, but rather imaginative engagements with an array of early modern women figures—from queens to commoners—with women writers at the center of the narrative, thus bringing their voices and experiences to life.

Because the list of women authors in my series includes figures generally unknown to popular audiences such as Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Wroth, Aemilia Lanyer, and Elizabeth Cary, I have framed my description of the series as follows:

Shakespeare's Sisters centers on women whose lives and voices both shape and are shaped by women, many of whom play a part in each other's stories. The series embraces themes from poetry and politics to child-rearing and female friendship, through moments of daring and danger, heartbreak and healing, forbidden ventures and illicit love.

Spanning generations and social classes, Shakespeare's Sisters paints a multi-hued portrait of Renaissance England, seen through the lives of courtiers, commoners, poets, playwrights, and above all, indomitable women who broke the rules of their time while juggling many of the responsibilities and obstacles faced by women worldwide today.

The opening novel in the series, Imperfect Alchemist, centering on Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, is currently with my agent; a draft of the second volume in the series, about Lady Mary Wroth, awaits further revision. When previously writing about my work on the Wroth novel, I commented on the exhilarating challenges I have experienced as a writer who moves between scholarship and fiction.⁵ Fictionalizing the story of a woman author I have...