Renaissance Quills of Their Own: Shakespeare's Sisters

In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Ramie Targoff chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

Ramie Targoff selected four female contemporaries of Shakespeare who were publicly recognised writers to challenge Virginia Woolf’s claim that ‘Judith Shakespeare could not exist’. Why Ramie opened with Virginia Woolf and Judith Shakespeare to confront the powerful but mistaken narrative that there were no female authors in Shakespeare’s England. Ramie chose female authors who crafted psalms, poetry, tragedy and diaries to showcase the breadth of Renaissance women’s writing. Ramie initially planned four separate mini biographies but shifted to an intertwined collective biography when she realised the women’s lives and networks overlapped.​ How Ramie braided the women’s stories to craft a biography that reads like a novel but avoids veering into fiction. Why Ramie treated letters, diaries and memoirs as the richest sources, privileging the women’s own voices wherever they survived. How Ramie retraced the women’s footsteps by visiting homes, castles, churches and landscapes to evoke their lived environments. How Ramie marked speculative moments for readers, explaining what is known, what is guessed, and how gaps in the record shaped her interpretations.