Shakespeare for Women: Middlebrow Feminism in Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters

This essay examines how two recent Shakespeare novels exemplify a group of recent fiction that explores how women’s selves form in relation to Shakespeare. I argue that a “middlebrow feminism” emerges in Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) as their female protagonists both rely on and react against Shakespeare to shape their identities. Working in tandem with their paratextual promotional apparatus, the novels imply that women readers possess a similar ambivalence toward Shakespeare. I suggest that this fiction redefines for a new era an American middlebrow tradition that has long construed the reading of Shakespeare as a vehicle for self-education, improvement, and advancement. In the essay’s conclusion, I investigate the feminist possibilities and limitations of the identities, both individual and collective, that women’s Shakespeare novels cultivate.

In eleanor brown’s novel the weird sisters, the sisters muse: “What if the name you were given had already been lived in, had been inhabited so well, as a matter of fact, that its very mention brings to mind its original owner, and leaves your existence little more than an afterthought?” (61–62). The sisters’ names are those of Shakespeare’s heroines, and the challenge to self-possession that they express is shared by a number of recent novels written by and addressed to women. Together, these “women’s novels” constitute a distinct grouping of Shakespearean adaptations, defined by their female authorship, their publication by large publishing houses for the trade market, and their engagement with genres such as historical fiction, romance, and chick lit that are conventionally marketed to women. Thematically, they are preoccupied with how women’s selves form in contact and conflict with Shakespeare, both individually and as part of collectives. In this way, the novels address self-development through Shakespeare, following in the footsteps of earlier presentations that emphasized Shakespeare’s improving and enjoyable qualities for an expanding middle-class public. Their educational project is staged both within the fiction and through its paratextual apparatus, which includes readers’ guides, discussion questions, blurbs, blog posts, and reader responses. In this essay, I examine how two such books—Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth (2008) and Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011)—use Shakespeare to think through women’s personal and collective identities in a patriarchal society.

My argument in this essay has two premises: first, this grouping of Shakespeare novels can be thought of as middlebrow fiction, and second, Shakespeare and the American middlebrow have had a long and closely entwined relationship. Based on these premises, I argue that in recent women’s novels, Shakespeare serves as a conduit for the fundamental middlebrow project of self-development. However, this fiction, along with its paratextual apparatus, suggests that characters and readers develop their identities not so much by respecting Shakespeare’s cultural authority, although they do gesture at times to this kind of deference, as by managing and even at times contesting his position. I characterize this ambivalence by arguing that the novels cultivate a middlebrow feminism that resists patriarchy through personal, affective modes of response rather than through advocacy for political or social change. A key implication is that women’s novels evoke a tension over the stakes for women in encountering Shakespeare, for the novels in their institutional contexts construct women’s collective identities as highly significant for identity formation and yet also constrain their public impact and range of diversity.

Some further definition is required of the category that I am calling “women’s Shakespeare novels.” In my use, it refers to contemporary middlebrow fiction written by women that engages pervasively with either Shakespeare’s work or his person and that is fundamentally focused on women’s lives and identities. These novels can usefully be thought of in terms of middlebrow fiction, which in turn necessitates an understanding of how critics describe contemporary middlebrow fiction. Beth Driscoll argues that “middlebrow values are above all intensely reader-oriented, dedicated to the pleasure and the usefulness of reading” (28), while Birte Christ asserts that middlebrow novels teach readers how to turn characters and narratives into equipment for living (n.p.). Similarly, Timothy Aubry has argued that middlebrow fiction serves important therapeutic functions for readers (25). For these scholars, the middlebrow hitches readers’ education—in the form of self-development and self-improvement—to their enjoyment and entertainment. The conjoined emphasis on readers’ education and enjoyment is vital to women’s Shakespeare novels, going hand in hand with the priority given to readers’ experience. It would be misleading to act as if middlebrow fiction exists as a reified objective entity; rather, it emerges in dialogic construction between those who produce and disseminate it and those who receive it. Thus, the books and their paratextual apparatus cultivate the edifying and pleasurable value of Shakespeare—his middlebrow qualities, so to speak—by paying explicit, solicitous attention to a hoped-for readership. By definition, middlebrow fiction seeks a large reading public, and it is no surprise that middlebrow Shakespeare fiction mostly issues from the big publishing houses, which institutionally drive and realize the ambition to make Shakespeare attractive to a substantial readership.

The other striking attribute of women’s Shakespeare novels is their moderate and expansive feminism. Here, too, they take their cue from middlebrow fiction more generally. In her study of Oprah’s Book Club, Cecilia Konchar Farr points out that Oprah novels, seen by many as synonymous, or at least convergent, with the middlebrow, “are, in general, by, about, and for women,” and “capture the spirit of the old feminist maxim ‘Women are people, too,’ the maxim that insists that women’s lives and desires, like men’s, are complex” (23). This interpretation of feminism is inclusive and elemental enough to appeal to women across the spectrum of the American public and makes sense as a sales strategy, too, given that women make up the largest share of fiction readers.¹ The middlebrow focus on self-improvement is feminist when it targets women specifically, as it suggests that women are entitled to focus on and develop themselves. Anita Shreve’s The Pilot’s Wife (1998), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2001) all exemplify the middlebrow feminism of Oprah’s Book Club, though in other ways they are quite different from one another. Likewise, the two novels I discuss have in common a broadly feminist outlook, although they lack the racial and cultural diversity that were hallmarks of Oprah’s Book Club.

In keeping with a middlebrow feminist ethos, the category of women’s Shakespeare fiction sets up Shakespeare as a historical authorial figure who still carries value, but who must be wrestled with, adapted, and sometimes combated altogether in order to bring pleasure and spur readers’ self-improvement. This work in the novels often takes the form of exploring how women’s identities form in dialogue with the white, masculinist inheritance that Shakespeare is taken to represent. Often written from the perspective of a secondary, marginalized, or maligned female character, sometimes recasting narratives or characters in a contemporary scenario, the novels invite twenty-first-century women both to learn from Shakespeare and to challenge him.

Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth and Brown’s The Weird Sisters exemplify different generic strategies pursued by women’s Shakespeare novels. Lady Macbeth’s engagement with Shakespeare takes the form of historical fiction centered around one of his most well-known female characters, with plot elements that significantly overlap with one of the plays. Other novels that fit that description include, to name just a few, Lois Leveen’s Juliet’s Nurse (2014), Anne Fortier’s Juliet (2010), Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), and if we extend the purview to the lives of Shakespeare and his family, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020). The Weird Sisters’ engagement with Shakespeare, on the other hand, is loosely thematic rather than literally adaptive, although the references are so plentiful as to be unavoidable. Brown uses romantic comedy and chick lit to create this freer take on Shakespeare’s work. Novels that follow a similar formula include Jeanne Ray’s Julie and Romeo (2000), Lise Saffran’s Juno’s Daughters (2011), and Adriana Trigiani’s Kiss Carlo (2017). It is also the case, however, that some version of romance appears in almost all middlebrow women’s Shakespeare novels, recalling Janice Radway’s argument that romance serves as an important vehicle through which women readers reflect on and shape their identities (Romance 207). Taken together, Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters represent many of the aesthetic and cultural qualities of women’s Shakespeare novels.

Although Shakespeare fictions have become a popular field of study, little has been written about the kind of recent women’s Shakespeare novels that I discuss in this essay.² Despite their impressive publishing pedigree (Random House, Penguin), and the fact that they are geared to the trade rather than the mass market, these are books that tend to get scant or condescending mention. King’s Lady Macbeth was consigned to a niche audience—“recommended for historical fiction collections,” wrote a reviewer for the Library Journal (Bird-Guilliams), while Brown’s The Weird Sisters was identified by The New York Times as “likable but sometimes careless” (De Haven). The lack of interest extends to literary critics, who have either ignored middlebrow Shakespeare novels or noted them merely in passing, with a few important exceptions (Hopkins, “Man with a Map,” Carroll, Iyengar).³ In sum, women’s Shakespeare fiction is easily overlooked. However, in making Shakespeare speak to a broad public that is centered around women, this literature merits more critical attention than it has yet received.

The authors, publishers, and promoters behind this fiction are most certainly not the first to try to make Shakespeare publicly accessible, and Shakespeare and the American middlebrow have had a long, mutually beneficial relationship. Although Shakespeare novels of the precise kind I examine in this essay are a phenomenon of the last few decades, women have been a targeted readership for works about Shakespeare in the U.S. since at least the early nineteenth century (Nathans).⁴ After the Civil War, numerous institutions, both large-scale and grassroots, further opened Shakespeare’s capital to an expanding American reading public (Murphy 5; Radway, Feeling 127; Rubin 9). Among these institutions were women’s reading clubs and societies, of which a substantial number focused mostly or entirely on Shakespeare. Katherine West Scheil has told the story of these clubs, which “helped spread the idea that reading Shakespeare was a democratic practice, available to everyone, not just privileged citizens in metropolitan areas, and that reading could be closely aligned with participation in intellectual and civic life” (94). Elizabeth McHenry has shown that during the same period, African American women brought Shakespeare into their reading clubs and societies, reading Shakespeare’s texts alongside African American and women authors (227, 232). The Shakespeare clubs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century set a precedent for the burgeoning of women-authored texts that not only adapt Shakespeare but actively appropriate his works and his image to serve women’s agendas.

The progressive inclinations of Shakespeare clubs of the late nineteenth century co-existed with more conservative tendencies. Indeed, Shakespeare initially served as a resource in ways that did not seem threatening to the ideology of separate gender spheres because, as Theodora Penny Martin argues, the clubs emphasized women’s development as mothers and thus as educators of children (102). Martin stresses that reading clubs were strongly preservationist, providing “a way for women to identify with others like themselves and a way to prevent that identity from changing” (18). Most clubs were defined by racial and class-based exclusions. Elizabeth Long has noted that white clubs were almost entirely segregated and tended to be populated primarily by the middle classes; the advocacy of club women “softened the harsh effects of an inequitable social order without attempting to dismantle either the existing social hierarchy or its underlying causes” (54). Notwithstanding the pioneering efforts that McHenry identifies, the benefits of engaging with Shakespeare were not equitably or universally distributed among American women.

Recent women’s Shakespeare novels espouse a similar blend of progressive and conservative values. They encourage women to empower themselves, but most do not call for—and if anything, push against—a reordering of underlying political and social structures, instead affirming a white, middle-class model of subjectivity. They provide a “safe” site for many women to meet with Shakespeare, but like Shakespeare clubs before them, they are not as inclusive as they purport or perhaps wish to be. What they do offer their readership, in keeping with the history of middlebrow Shakespeare initiatives, is the promise of personal development and the forging of social bonds with other women.

“if you think you know lady m., think again”

Readers of Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth learn that they can be strong without turning into Lady Macbeth. This historical fiction recuperates the title character from Shakespeare’s harsh characterization and makes a claim for her strength in broadly feminist terms. The book makes an appeal to readers based on the premise that they have at least a glancing familiarity with Macbeth, as many Americans do from high school, and yet King establishes textual and narrative distance from Macbeth that models the process by which readers can learn from Shakespeare while they also learn to regard him critically. The narrative frames the quest for self-empowerment in ways open-ended enough to include women of different political and cultural persuasions, and yet restricted enough to reveal the exclusions in its projected readership. Using Shakespeare as its vehicle, the novel makes considerable gestures toward solidarity between women but also constrains the implications of such networks.

Fraser King’s historical fiction re-shapes Lady Macbeth into a proto-feminist heroine whom even readers who might not self-identify as feminists can admire. Key to this generic strategy is bypassing Shakespeare with historical sources. While this decision could estrange readers from the character, quite the opposite effect occurs: for a certain projected readership, she is re-cast as a more sympathetic figure. In the Historical Note at the front of the book, Fraser King writes that she based Lady Macbeth not on Shakespeare’s play but on “the most accurate historical evidence available to date regarding the lives of these eleventh-century Scottish monarchs,” though in a less prominent Author’s Note she concedes that the source material consists only of charters of land donations that assign Macbeth’s wife a name and royal parentage (n.p., 332). Fraser King uses both the license of historical fiction and a presentist orientation to re-interpret the ethics of her character’s complex gender performance. Her Lady Macbeth, “Rue,” short for “Gruadh,” resists being treated as chattel in the exchanges of powerful men, and her first-person narration is threaded through with a rhetoric of fierce self-sufficiency that the author derives from Celtic “warrior woman” legends (Fraser King 334). Yet at the same time, Rue exercises power mostly within the domestic domain and indirectly through counsel to her husband, for though she has a royal birthright, she cannot be the ruling monarch. Thus, much of her identity is staged in the relational terms of marriage, maternity, and women’s friendship. No matter how remarkable a medieval queen she may be, Rue remains enfolded within recognizable, conventional structures of femininity.

The narrative begins in Rue’s tumultuous childhood: born a princess, she is abducted twice and married at age fifteen to the thane Gilcomgan to seal a political alliance. After Macbeth kills Gilcomgan, his cousin, to claim the thaneship of Moray, he immediately marries the already pregnant Rue. Despite its violent origin, the marriage grows into an enduring love match as Macbeth rises in power. Unlike his Shakespearean counterpart, this Macbeth does not commit a treasonous act of regicide but is crowned King of Scots when he defeats the devious King Duncan in hand-to-hand combat. With Rue’s help, he rules benevolently and peacefully for seventeen years. The challenge to his reign issues from the machinations of Duncan’s son, Malcolm Can-more, who eventually succeeds in murdering Macbeth, but not before Macbeth ensures that Rue’s son will be crowned King. The Epilogue returns to Rue’s story a year after Macbeth’s death as she meets for the last time with her son, who, some months later, will also be killed by Malcolm. Rue determines to go into exile to thwart Malcolm’s intent to kill or marry her. The last words of the novel read: “I am done with sorrow and intend to seek a little peace and magic. For now” (Fraser King 330). Rue incorporates aspects of the supernatural—female mentors have passed down to her matriarchal forms of knowledge and insight, such as the properties of herbs and plants—but she is no witch in the malevolent mold of Shakespeare’s. Fraser King rewrites the trajectory of Lady Macbeth’s life so that, although the character experiences great travails, she emerges as a hardy, if sorrowful, survivor by novel’s end.

In historicizing Lady Macbeth, the novel teaches readers that this medieval queen can be turned against her antecedent in Shakespeare to serve as an exemplar, by virtue of her individual qualities and her affiliation with other women. If there is a key word in the novel, it is “strength” and its variants (Hopkins, “Man with a Map” 153). A mantra emerges in Rue’s mother’s dying words to her daughter: “Be strong, my dear one, for what will come” (Fraser King 21). King depicts Rue as being strong in multiple senses: she conjoins the martial abilities and physical courage that come with her Celtic heritage as a warrior woman—she insists on sword training with her father’s wards and fights off a would-be rapist, among many examples—with more stereotypically female traits such as patience, endurance, creativity, and mercy. In addition, there is the “strength of your royal blood,” which Macbeth tells Rue she carries (219). The versatility of meaning that Fraser King evokes in “strength” make Rue a model for a wide range of readers.

The novel works hard to show that Rue’s different forms of strength can co-exist, that performances usually reserved for men can cooperate with the nurturing and emotional labor often associated with women. Rue’s interest in political and martial matters is not only compatible with but also enhances her devotion to her husband, son, and nation, flouting her nurse’s belief that her failure to choose one or the other has produced her infertility:

“It is willfulness and old grief, poisoning your womb. You want to be a warrior, and you want to be a mother. A woman keeps to home and family, and tends to matters inside the home. A man keeps to war games and tends to matters outside.”

A queen tends to both, I wanted to say, but did not. She would not understand.

(218)

Rue’s insistence echoes Helen Gurley Brown’s rallying cry that women could “have it all,” which became a staple of pop culture feminism in the late twentieth century. Since then, the idea that women—even most mothers—work outside the home has become normalized. And King makes it even harder to take issue with Rue’s ambition to “tend to” multiple spheres because Rue does not seek to advance her own interests but rather to serve others, particularly her husband. When she convinces an old friend to make her a suit of armor, she says: “It is essential that I am seen as supportive of all Macbeth does, but strong in my own right, too. For him, for Moray, for Lulach. And Scotland” (224). The novel abounds with such selfless and patriotic sentiments, which allow Rue to be read potentially both as a feminist role model and as embodying a more conservative white American womanhood.

Fraser King represents Rue’s strength as not only encompassing “work” and “home,” but also as supporting the welfare of other women, savvily connecting Rue to book clubs and reading groups. In the course of the narrative, women’s collective identity becomes increasingly significant. Once Macbeth has toppled Duncan to take the throne, Rue’s is the lone voice advocating that Duncan’s orphaned children be spared from assassination; she does so on the basis that their mother had asked her to protect them. Here, again, Rue is legible in the context of many women today: she is a mother who intervenes in the public sphere to protect other women and children. Rue’s influence over Macbeth prevails, and Duncan’s young son Malcolm is allowed to live. This decision turns out to be fatal, as Malcolm returns in adulthood to avenge his father against Macbeth. Though Rue blames herself for unwittingly bringing about her husband’s death, she reckons: “But if that chance came again, I could not order the deaths of children. . . . What I had done had been most rightful, though it came with a hard price” (324–25). Whereas Shakespeare’s character strips herself of maternal capacity to ease the path to regicide, Rue takes an ethical stance closely bound to her maternal body and identity, one that the novel affirms despite its costs. The underlying message of solidarity between women based on their shared maternity is well-calculated to resonate not only with individual readers but with book clubs, many of which are built around women’s relationships (Long; Radway, Romance). The optimistic notion that women’s self-empowerment is additive to their empathy and care for others—both family and friends—makes the novel politically and socially expansive, a suitable “pick” for women across the American ideological spectrum. After all, who would disagree with sentiments like “You can draw strength from within yourself, like water from a well” (Fraser King 64)? Such generalized statements allow a reader or reading group to interpret women’s strength in her or their own ways.

The goal of having Lady Macbeth read as a heroine requires author, publisher, and promotional apparatus to take advantage of Shakespeare’s perceived educational value while strategically distancing the novel from his play. The paperback edition of Lady Macbeth and web-sites that promote the novel reveal both affiliation with Shakespeare and estrangement from him, often in combination. In the blog “Word Wenches,” curated by writers of historical fiction, an interview with Fraser King contains this soundbite from a fellow author: “Lady Macbeth! I feel smarter just owning it!” The first question in the Reading Group Guide at the back of the paperback edition asks readers about their prior knowledge of Shakespeare’s play: “What did you already know about Gruadh and Macbeth before reading Lady Macbeth?”—while the last question invites comparisons: “How is Susan Fraser King’s Macbeth different from Shakespeare’s character? What are their similarities?” (King 355–56). Much of the paratextual material evokes this compare/contrast structure: an Entertainment Weekly review, blurbed for the front cover of the paperback, proclaims: “If you think you know Lady M., think again” (Bernardo). Blurbs from Mary Jo Putney and Susan Holloway Scott that appear in the front pages of the paperback edition strike similar notes: “this novel will forever change the way you view Macbeth and his lady”; and “Forget everything you ever knew about Lady Macbeth!” The rhetoric suggests that King’s novel will allow readers to “forget” the negative impression left by Lady Macbeth, a process, of course, that requires remembering Shakespeare’s character in the first place.

Taken together with the thematics, the paratextual material sends interestingly mixed signals to readers. There is still a strong statement of Shakespeare’s educational value for the reader, as middlebrow presentations of Shakespeare have long stressed, for the book clearly trades on his name as well as that of his play and characters. Yet Shakespeare’s value emerges only through the filter of feminist revision and often in opposition to what are taken to be Shakespeare’s judgments of his characters. A reader, “BRT,” on goodreads puts it bluntly:

Using historical research, Susan Fraser King presents a vivid portrait of the real Lady Macbeth that is in stark contrast to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. In reality, rather than a vain, greedy, murderous, crazy bitch, she was a strong, passionate, caring, independent woman who stood by her family and her roots. Of course, we women know how history deals with strong, independent women . . . they quickly become crazy bitches in the annals written by men.

Multiple readers echo this sense that Fraser King offers readers access to the “true” and the “real,” sustaining principles of the middlebrow as well as of historical fiction (Heller 89). This strain of commentary locates the novel’s edifying use in its willingness to counter Shakespeare’s patriarchal shaping of Lady Macbeth with an approach labeled as historically authentic. The strength that serves within the text as a mantra for Rue functions implicitly on the paratextual level to intimate to readers that they can discover their own strength—not by reading Shakespeare’s play, but by reading Fraser King’s adaptation. The novel thus takes over Shakespeare’s mandate for self-improvement and frames itself as an enlightening experience for women.

It is also true, however, that even as Lady Macbeth strives for inclusivity, it shapes women’s self-images in racially and socially exclusive ways. Because Rue evokes familiar, uncontroversial tropes of strength and empowerment, her character leaves plenty of leeway for women to see in her a mirror of themselves. But the reflected image is of romanticized whiteness: Rue sees herself in the water with “blue eyes, wide and dark in moonlight; pale cheeks, hair like a sheen of bronze” (54). These stereotypically anglicized features are linked uncritically to the strength of Gruadh’s racially based claim to the throne: “Because I am descended in a direct line from Celtic kings, the purest royal blood courses through me and blushes my skin. . . . We are proud of our heritage” (9). This Lady Macbeth is a princess, and in keeping with the layered connotations of “blood” in a medieval and early modern context, her family bloodline, which puts her in line for the throne, is racially coded as well as classed (Feerick). Thus, the novel aligns itself with the privilege of white, upper-middle-class readers, who have been prominent in the American book club landscape and who have often been the recipients of middlebrow appeals, both universalizing those readers by allowing them to relate transhistorically to Rue and exposing the extent to which other readers are limited from the full range of identification. It is unclear what room the novel leaves for the latter to participate in its Shakespearean project of self-education.

“the keys to ourselves”

Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters (2011) does not adapt one of Shakespeare’s plays. This fact may account for why it has been one of the most commercially successful among recent Shakespeare novels, becoming a bestseller briefly in hardcover and more resoundingly in trade paperback.⁵ What the novel does do is play on loose connections between its characters and Shakespeare’s, liberally quote him, and weave Shakespearean themes into the narrative. Part of its charm comes from the fact that it stages irreverence toward the patriarchal imperatives that Shakespeare seems to represent, for Brown pokes fun at the lionization of Shakespeare and stresses that her readers can choose how much or little Shakespeare they bring to bear upon the reading experience. The novel and its paratexts suggest that readers’ interpretive freedom serves as a form of self-realization and thus a fulfillment of the middlebrow mandate of self-education. Freedom is an earned concept in Brown’s narrative, which ends up being expressed not only through individual identity but also through the collective identity of sisterhood. Ultimately, the novel suggests that women can choose to involve Shakespeare in a conversation that is primarily between and about them, a message reinforced by the novel’s chick lit genre and its first-person plural narration. There is a return here to the ethos of the Shakespeare club, where knowledge was forged around Shakespeare, and where the real story was often what women were able to accomplish through the forms and structures of community that Shakespeare made possible. Brown’s iteration of community is, like Fraser King’s, limited, but it nevertheless points to how the reading of Shakespeare articulates the interplay between individual and collective identities for women.

Shakespeare is identified most strongly in the novel with the weird sisters’ father, Dr. James Andreas, a Shakespeare professor who has given his three daughters Shakespearean names: Rose (for Rosalind), Bean (for Beatrice), and Cordy (for Cordelia).⁶ He also quotes from Shakespeare to address all manner of subjects, creating a dysfunctional family language: “Here’s one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it’s damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. . . . He wasn’t the clearest of communicators” (Brown 267). Shakespeare’s obscure language thus impedes family relations as much as it facilitates them. The narrative is instigated by the daughters’ return to their hometown in Ohio to care for their mother, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. It quickly emerges that each sister has an ulterior motive for coming home: Rose fears moving abroad with her fiancé; Bean is fleeing an embezzlement charge at her big city job; and Cordy has an unintended pregnancy. Against the backdrop of their mother’s successful cancer treatment, each sister undergoes a drama of self-discovery. By the end, each sister has come to a new understanding of her identity, both within the family and in the world at large.

The novel’s title helps readers interpret the characters’ challenge in defining their identities. The narrator explains Shakespeare’s use of “weird” in Macbeth: “The word he originally used was much closer to ‘wyrd’ . . . ‘Wyrd’ means fate” (Brown 26). The sisters see themselves as “weird” and believe that “Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us” (27). In the Readers Guide at the back of the book, Brown explains that the “sisters are quite tied to the idea of destiny, and part of their story is their learning to accept what their fates really are, rather than grimly heading down the path of what they think they ought to be” (360). One form that destiny takes in the novel in birth order, so that the novel speculates about “what would happen if life forced us to step out of those prescribed roles” (362). Alongside birth order lies Shakespeare, who because he is associated so strongly with the weird sisters’ father is tied to questions of paternal and patriarchal influence. When it comes to their Shakespearean names, for example, “We wear our names heavily. And though we have tried to escape their influence, they have seeped into us, and we find ourselves living their patterns again and again” (63). Through Dr. Andreas as proxy, Shakespeare has imposed on these young women authoritative, scholarly, and masculinist models of identity formation. When their mother wonders “what we did to give you the idea that you had to be some master in your field by the time you were thirty,” the collective narrator responds: “The idea had come from living in the shadow of our father, in this tiny community where nothing mattered but the life of the mind” (341). The novel reads as the weird sisters’ struggle to break free of a patriarchal imagining of female identity and to become “weird” by their own lights rather than their father’s or Shakespeare’s.

While Shakespeare represents an irritating, and at times oppressive, patriarchal inheritance, he also becomes a synecdoche for the power of reading and books. Brown returns repeatedly to the family’s love of reading: “Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate” (25); “She’d been home for three days, and had done nothing but sleep and read and eat” (41); “Our parents had trained us to become readers, and the town’s library had been the one place, other than church, that we visited every week” (50); “when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces . . . I am reading!” (78). The encomiums to books are in line with what Nicola Humble has argued is middlebrow fiction’s explicit, even didactic, affirmation of reading: “Reading, for the feminine middlebrow, is a physical as well as an intellectual act: often compared to eating, it is a source of deep, sensual satisfaction, a self-indulgent pleasure, a means of escape as well as an affirmation of life choices” (Humble 46). Insofar as Shakespeare stands for reading, The Weird Sisters celebrates him. Yet even in this respect, the novel injects a note of caution, suggesting that reading cannot fully supply an identity for the sisters: “We think, in some ways, we have all done this our whole lives, searching for the book that will give us the keys to ourselves, let us into a wholly formed personality as though it were a furnished room to let” (Brown 271). Brown’s narrator voices an anxiety about the prescriptive and consuming nature of reading, which, given the extent to which Shakespeare hovers behind “the book,” echoes the concern that an externally imposed focus on Shakespeare has limited their sense of destiny and with it their self-development.

The Weird Sisters reveals a problem for women readers with the middlebrow as it has been conventionally received: the reading of Shakespeare fails to give women the “keys” to their selves and thus cannot lead to self-improvement. In this sense, Brown self-consciously frames the predicament of writing—and reading—middlebrow fiction for women that is oriented around Shakespeare. At a climactic moment of distress for Bean, when she has just declared, “I’m nothing,” a clergyman gives her counsel: “There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future” (337). The clergyman offers a popular therapeutic perspective in which the narratives that individuals choose have the power to shape their self-perception. Under the rubric of “the past” exists not only “the story of your sisters” that Bean has used to define herself, but also the defining role Shakespeare plays in the family, which similarly leaves Bean feeling inadequate (337). The challenge that Brown poses her characters—and metatextually poses herself as author—is how to tell a story that will “change the future” of how women engage with Shakespeare, which is also the future of their own self-definition.

Brown’s solution to crises prompted by Shakespeare includes a generic strategy. Where Lady Macbeth authorizes its title character through historical fiction, The Weird Sisters channels Shakespeare through chick lit, a genre of fiction that rose swiftly to prominence around the turn of the millennium. As Stephanie Harzewski has argued, chick lit takes a consumerist approach toward literary genres to articulate new models for its readers. Shakespeare is just an element, though one of the most fundamental for this novel, in chick lit’s “bricolage of diverse popular and literary forms” (Harzewski 5). Brown’s agent says as much in a website feature on successful query letters to publishers: “Throw some Shakespearean flavor into the mix and this is starting to sound like the perfect pitch!” (Sambuchino). The novel’s free use of Shakespearean quotations exemplifies the point: lines from Shakespeare’s plays are sprinkled throughout, but as Brown says in the Readers Guide, “absolutely stripped of any context or meaning” (363). The characters deploy Shakespeare’s words more as if they were voicing the “Shakespearean magnetic poetry” on the Andreas family fridge than as if they are inhabiting the worlds of the plays (222). The implication is that readers can, if they choose, skip freely over these sound bites from Shakespeare. They are not required to interpret the quotations in any sort of context or read the narrative in light of a Shakespearean source text. The characters do not engage with Shakespeare in that way, so why should readers? “Olivermagnus” on goodreads reinforces this attitude:

there are many quotes and allusions to Shakespeare, some which I got and some I didn’t. There’s something about each of the sisters that you can identify with. I so identified with Bean when she explained that she always carried a book so that when she’s in a waiting room she can just pull out her book and start reading. I think you will enjoy the book even more if you are knowledgeable about Shakespearean plays, but it won’t detract from the story if you’re not.

It is telling that “Olivermagnus” toggles between her somewhat insecure perception of the Shakespearean references and her identification with the sisters’ love of reading, as if she is hinting that more important than a specialized Shakespearean knowledge is the reader’s rapport with the characters, formed through a shared embrace of reading. The Weird Sisters’ selective, appropriative use of Shakespeare’s language highlights the characters’ crafting of authentic identities that use but are not enslaved to existing materials, including Shakespeare. Brown has her characters iterate the methods and logic of the chick lit genre in picking and choosing the Shakespeare that fits them best, rather than allowing their father’s authoritative Shakespeare to write them.

Narrative voice is also important in the novel’s response to Shakespeare. Brown’s distinctive choice of the first-person plural incorporates Rose, Bean, and Cordy into the collective “we”: “we have been nursed and nurtured on the plays, and the slightest reminder brings the language back” (3); “We’re sure that’s exactly what Shakespeare was trying to say” (105); “Sometimes we have the overwhelming urge to grab our father by the shoulders and shake him until the meaning of his obtuse quotations fell from his mouth like loosened teeth” (327). Though Brown traces each sister’s dawning recognition of her individuality, equally important is the maturation of their collective identity. The novel builds toward the sisters’ integration of individual and collective self-concepts, so that its final scene, where the family celebrates Christmas Eve by reading aloud “the Christmas speech” from the first scene of Hamlet, affirms the different directions that their lives are taking alongside their enduring cohesion: “Inside [the house], our beds, our memories, our history, our fates, our destinies. Inside, we three. The Weird Sisters. Hand in hand” (353). Shakespeare is undeniably embedded in the sororal relationship at novel’s end. Yet it is “we three” who take precedence and who have gained the voice and authority to manage the patriarchal language of Shakespeare.

The first-person plural also invites women readers, either as individuals or as part of a reading collective, to see themselves included in the narrative “we.” Accordingly, The Weird Sisters’ paratexts pitch the novel to book clubs. In addition to the Readers Guide, which includes “A Conversation with Eleanor Brown” and “Discussion Questions,” Eleanor Brown’s author website has a page called “Book Clubs,” where the author states: “I would love to chat with your book club via phone, FaceTime, Zoom, or Skype.” In interviews, Brown stresses how much she enjoys speaking with clubs, and she maintains an active presence on social media, where she regularly reaches out to her fans. This friendly, accessible authorial persona situates the plural narrative voice within the context of women’s community; the book and its characters are embedded in the social world of readers. The identity crisis catalyzed by Shakespeare becomes that of Brown’s readers, and the resolution likewise rests with women’s ability to manage Shakespeare collectively. Through genre and voice, Brown constructs a conversation occasioned by, and inclusive of, Shakespeare, but one that presents itself as being fundamentally about how women’s selves form in relation to the selves of other women.

Like Lady Macbeth, The Weird Sisters projects an idealized, transcendent view of women’s communities that is undercut by its far more restricted manifestations in the novel. Its contemporary American setting might seem to invite representations of cultural pluralism. However, The Weird Sisters makes few gestures toward races other than white, social classes other than the upper middle class, religions other than Christianity, or other constituents of diverse identity in twenty-first-century America. The narrative takes place almost wholly within the confines of the fictional Barnwell, Ohio, a small college town that is so cozily insular and homogenous that for decades it has had the same librarian, described as having eyes “sharp, watery blue” (51). Other than such small identifying features, characters’ race or ethnicity is never mentioned: the novel both takes whiteness for granted and shows no interest in addressing race forthrightly. One of the only exceptions is when Cordy describes a production of The Merchant of Venice that she found laughable: “The Prince of Morocco, you know? . . . The guy playing him was, like, Rastafarian? And he had fake dreadlocks. And an accent” (131). In response, “Our father chuckled. ‘Mislike me not for my complexion, mon,’ he said, in a clumsy patois” (132). While the intent is seemingly to underscore the family’s knowingness about the racial stereotypes on display in the theatrical production, the passage effectively mocks theater that attempts to depict cultural and racial diversity, and it ends with Dr. Andreas performing a sort of blackface. One of the only moments in the book in which racial identity becomes explicit is bracketed as a fictional portrayal that serves to reinforce the overwhelming whiteness of the novel’s milieu and characters.

Class and religion in The Weird Sisters similarly demarcate the boundaries of women’s Shakespearean conversations. The text’s class politics are virtually non-existent. Though readers learn that Cordy, a college dropout, has had an itinerant, marginal existence on the road, when she becomes pregnant, she is welcomed back to the comfortable family home. Similarly, Bean’s law firm declines to press charges against her for embezzlement, a choice that bespeaks her white privilege. Episcopalianism, the Andreas’ church affiliation, is the only kind of religion mentioned. The “Readers Guide” reveals that Christianity was part of Brown’s conception for the novel. In answer to a question about the book’s title, she said, “I really wanted to focus on the importance of the number three, and religion was going to be a bigger part of the novel. But when I created the father and the family began to take shape around his devotion to Shakespeare, I knew I was going to need a different title” (Brown 360). Her response indexes a familiar congruity between dedication to Shakespeare and Christian worship that dates back at least as far as David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. The fact that the novel ends on Christmas Eve, with a Christian interpretation of a speech from Hamlet, plays into an anachronistic sense that mainline Protestantism is the unquestioned normative religious disposition in the United States and suggests that Shakespeare is especially congenial to Christian readers.

Race, class, and religion, as well as sexual and gender orientation, are tightly enclosed in The Weird Sisters and yet do not provoke any scrutiny by characters who are otherwise extremely self-reflective. The lack of curiosity extends to the “Discussion Questions,” which focus on individual responsibility, sibling relationships, birth order, and parental role models. Only one touches on religion—“How does your own family’s faith, or lack thereof, influence you?” (Brown 368)—and even then, there is no invitation to explore comparative contexts. The concerted decision to ignore external, cultural determinants of identity in favor of personal, and thus supposedly universal, dynamics has implications for the book’s participation in the longstanding middlebrow project of making Shakespeare accessible to an expansive reading public. While Brown’s approach to adapting Shakespeare is premised on giving women opportunities for fuller self-representation, the novel extends that invitation only to some women.

Conclusion: shakespeare and middlebrow feminism

Recent women’s Shakespeare novels attempt to speak to and for women’s identities, writ both individually and communally. In so doing, they take a position that is recognizably middlebrow in its attempt to call into being a reading public. My analysis of Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters has focused on some of the strategies that these novels employ to make Shakespeare seem accessible and his characters identifiable, two keys to finding his use value, a key goal of middlebrow fiction. I have argued that the novels’ metatextual and paratextual message is that readers can best obtain profit from Shakespeare not primarily by appreciating his “greatness” and definitely not by worshipping him, as was encouraged by earlier popularizers, but rather by actively managing Shakespeare and what might be thought of as his patriarchal baggage. Interestingly, opening Shakespeare to a moderate feminist critique makes him more, not less, useful to contemporary women readers in their quest for self-development.

In closing, I want to reflect on two questions raised by my analysis: What are the current limitations of middlebrow Shakespeare novels? And what potential exists for reimagining them? The tendency of these novels to deploy Shakespeare toward narratives of women’s identity formation can seem to be in tension with more structural or systemic versions of feminism. Lady Macbeth and The Weird Sisters belong to a category of novels whose feminism might be thought of as therapeutic in that they advocate for women to think of themselves as worthy of investment in their own care and development. But they are vulnerable to criticism for only considering identities in personal terms and for turning self-investment into a capitalist proposition—for example, by thematizing women’s bonding in ways that correspond with the reading groups and book clubs that are their sales targets. One way to express this problem is to follow Nancy Fraser’s appraisal of late twentieth-century feminism and to suggest that the novels favor “the politics of recognition,” with recognition defined as “a positive relation to oneself,” over “the politics of redistribution” (4, 168). In Fraser’s terms, cultural acknowledgment for women can come at the cost of advocating for political and economic equality. Further, if the novels represent women’s assemblages as personal and social rather than political or activist in nature, it could imply that the former connections are the main or only sources of support a woman can expect. In that vein, the late Lauren Berlant argued that the works of “women’s culture” constitute “the commodified genres of intimacy,” generating an illusory “‘intimate public’ that is packaged and marketed to women” (x). Seen through Berlant’s lens, the primary function of women’s Shakespeare novels is indeed therapeutic in an inward turning modality, the point being to help women improve their lives through introspection rather than through changing the system that shapes lives. An intimate public does not tap into the feminist potential of a women’s collective.

Perhaps the most pressing issue, though, is that the novels and their paratexts are directed to only some women, excluding through silent omission those, especially nonwhite readers, who do not fit publishers’ concepts of a “mainstream” readership. A “diversity baseline survey” of the publishing industry conducted in 2019 by the multicultural children’s book publisher, Lee & Low, found that 76 percent of publishing and review journals staff identified as white, with Black and African Americans severely under-represented at 5 percent and Hispanics/Latinos/Mexicans at 6 percent (“Where Is the Diversity”). These percentages were similar in marketing/sales departments to the industry as a whole, pointing to the fact that “decisions on how to position books to the press and to consumers, and if and where to send authors on tour—critical considerations in the successful launching of any publication” are made by staff whose assumptions about the race, gender, and other demographics of a targeted readership may wittingly or unwittingly guide its decision-making (Ho). Ironically, in trying to reach what the publishing industry sees as a broad mainstream readership, the Shakespeare novels I have discussed participate in publishing practices that largely still marginalize women who do not conform to certain demographics and thus foreclose the potential for a more capacious and diverse public discourse.

But while calling attention to their problems and limitations, I do not want to dismiss so-called middlebrow Shakespeare novels entirely. The fact that women’s identities are treated affectively and personally can be seen as a potential key to the wider impact a broad-based literature based on Shakespeare can enjoy. As a number of critics have argued, middlebrow fiction embeds progressive political interests in affective strategies: Cecelia Konchar Farr writes of Oprah’s Book Club that it operated on a principle of aesthetic freedom, which “takes the political tenets of democracy into the personal realm and founds aesthetic value on individual choices rather than on absolute principles” (101–2), while Jaime Harker notes that for female interwar novelists, “personal experience connected with a larger societal critique” (5).⁷ There is also the example of #metoo movement, which emerged on a foundation of women’s personal narratives and gained momentum through women’s expressions of solidarity, to show how affective modes can motivate political discourse and, when pushed, increasingly spur conversation about women’s differently raced and classed experiences.⁸ Similarly, middlebrow novels tell personal stories, and in their solicitousness toward readers, considered both as individuals and collectives, can create spaces for conversation that serve as reminders of the permeability between the personal and the political.

Shakespeare provides an impetus and site upon which such conversations continue to unfold, and there is ample potential for Shakespeare to speak in middlebrow forms to and for publics constituted in more varied forms than the publishing industry standard to date. Oprah’s Book Club charted new territory at the turn of the millennium in giving broad appeal to literature that blended high literary culture and multiculturalism; similar forces, both large-scale and grassroots, could, and I suspect will, push novels that make Shakespeare identifiable and accessible to readerships that have previously been defined as niche or alternative. There are pioneers out there: Gloria Naylor’s corpus of novels, and more recently, the Trinidadian American Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006) and Even in Paradise (2016), in which post-colonial politics meets historical romance, illustrate the possibilities for a burgeoning middlebrow Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. The field is open for middlebrow American Shakespeare novels that tackle issues of race, queerness, class, religion, disability, and more. At stake is the future of Shakespeare’s American reading public.