Title: Women writers of the English renaissance
First published: 1996
Description: Did women have a Renaissance? Over the last decade much of the most eminent and significant scholarship in Renaissance studies has attempted to answer this question. Kim Walker's Women Writers of the English Renaissance takes a commanding lead among the responses.

In a careful, current, and wide-ranging survey of Renaissance women writers, Walker examines the social, educational, economic, and ideological constraints under which women wrote; their attempts to move from the margin to the center of literary production; and their establishment of careers as professional writers. Both major and minor writers - poets, diarists, letter writers, romance writers, playwrights, and biographers - are discussed here in revealing, reliable, and provocative ways. Major writers including Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth are presented in a new, more broad perspective.

Walker's synthesis of cultural history and literary criticism makes this volume a significant accomplishment that should be read by every scholar and student of the culture and literature of Tudor and Stuart England.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, English literature, Women and literature, History and criticism, History, Women authors, Renaissance
Places: England
People: Elizabeth Cary Lady (1585 or 6-1639), Mary Sidney Herbert Pembroke Countess of (1561-1621), Mary Wroth Lady (ca. 1586-ca. 1640)
Time periods: Early modern, 1500-1700, 17th century, 16th century
LC classification: PR113 .W35 1996