Four female writers at the court of Elizabeth I

Almost a century ago, in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf claimed that if William Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister the obstacles to her sharing his vocation would have been insurmountable. Woolf’s argument that a woman needs ‘money and a room of her own’ in order to write proved persuasive. ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ has become a pop-cultural trope.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the distinguished American scholar of the Renaissance Ramie Targoff should borrow the phrase for a study of four woman writers. Her title offers a shortcut to understanding how significant this immensely accomplished quartet is for readers and writers today. Not that Targoff’s elegantly readable, immaculately researched book needs any establishing gimmick. Lucid and detailed, it’s the best kind of literary-historical writing: a page-turner with no trace of lazy fictionalising. And it tells a story of real importance.

Shakespeare’s Sisters examines the life and work of the poets Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer, the playwright Elizabeth Cary and the great diarist Anne Clifford. Alternating chapters juxtapose their lives while retaining a biographical through line. But the book opens with Elizabeth I herself – that centrepetal figure whose patronage, direct or indirect, turned out to be a determining factor in each woman’s life, since, one way or another, all four were born within the orbit of the court.

Earliest, and first to be introduced, is Mary Sidney (1561-1621), the sister of Sir Philip and dedicatee of his long pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. She first published by editing his work after his death in 1586, and would go on to produce translations and occasional dramas. But perhaps her greatest achievement was her continuation of his project to translate the Psalms of King Davidinto contemporary English verse. Her 107 translations deploy a bravura array of forms. What still astonishes is how she makes English, a notoriously unrhyming language, flexible and singing.