Shakespeare worked in an artistic community designed by and for men.

But men weren't the only ones writing in the early modern period.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger Director.

In a room of one's own, Virginia Woolf famously imagined what might have happened if Shakespeare

had a sister who was as gifted a writer as he was. She invents Judith Shakespeare and concludes

that this female genius would have been doomed.

Quote, any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century would certainly have gone crazed,

shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village,

half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at, Wolf Road.

But that's not the end of the story.

Ramey Targoff teaches English and Italian literature at Brandeis University. She's also a member of the Folgers' Board of Governors. Targhoff's latest book is called Shakespeare's Sisters, How

Women Wrote the Renaissance. And it's a group biography of four great women writers who were Shakespeare's Sisters, How Women Wrote the Renaissance. And it's a group biography of four

great women writers who are Shakespeare's contemporaries, whose work Wolf likely never read.

If she had read Mary Sidney, Amelia Lanier, Anne Clifford, and Elizabeth Carey, Wolf might

have thought differently about the fate of her fictional Judith

Shakespeare. Despite decades of scholarly effort excavating the work of these women writers,

they're still underrepresented on college reading lists. In her book, Targhoff makes a forceful

argument for their literary merit and the importance of reading these writers

alongside their more familiar male contemporaries. Here's Ramey Targoff in conversation with

Barbara Bogave. One sentence in your epilogue really jumped out at me. You write that you graduated

with a BA in English from Yale in 1989,

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