Shakespeare's Sister

I find this article on the exhibition Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500-1700 very interesting. Partially because it sounds like an interesting exhibition, but also because of what they seem to have found. The title comes from A Room of One's Own, of course, where Virginia Woolf speculated that women must have been exceptionally oppressed and pushed aside if they had dared to try to be writers - but the exhibition shows that there were many female writers who had been popular in their own time but were later forgotten.

Far from being shunned, deprived and dismissed, these are women whose learning and ambition were nurtured by families, who established networks of friendships and taste, and who eventually influenced religious and cultural life as public figures.
...
And what may be more surprising for generations who have lived with Woolf’s vision of Judith Shakespeare and her contemporaries: there is almost no evidence of oppression, none of stifled talents, little sign of beings “so thwarted and hindered” that they contemplate suicide. Only immensely talented women, writing.

Not to stomp on Virginia Woolf, I suspect that she was under the spell of Victorian idea of progress - that things always improve over time. It runs through a lot of twentieth century feminism, in that since women's rights did improve in pretty much a straight line through the century, it's assumed that the line can be continued backwards in time, that the same oppressions existed in the past and were pushed more strongly. Historians like my ladycrush Laurel Ulrich Thatcher have done a lot to show that the world is more complicated than that, and I hope that they continue to do so.