Early Modern Women's Writing

In a famous passage in A Room of One''s Own, Virginia Woolf asked ''why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age''. She went on to speculate about an imaginary Judith Shakespeare who might have been destined for a career as illustrious as that of her brother William, except that she had none of his chances. The truth is that many women wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centurie...