The story of Shakespeare s sister that Virginia Woolf tells in "A Room of One s Own" has sparked interest in the question of the place of the woman writer in the Renaissance. By now, the process of recovering lost voices of early modern women is well under way. But Woolf s engagement with the Renaissance went deeper than that question indicates, as important as it was. Her writing reveals a lifelong conversation with the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the travel narratives of Hakluyt to the works of Donne, Milton, Montaigne, and of course Shakespeare.
The...