Renaissance Quills of Their Own: Shakespeare's Sisters

Biographers in Conversation · Sep 3, 2026 · 39m

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…