Early Women Writers

Woods, Susanne and Margaret P. Hannay, eds. Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2000. 443 pp.

Anita Pacheco, ed. A Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. 411 pp.

I wish books like Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, edited by Susanne Woods and Margaret Hannay, and A Companion to Early Modern English Women's Writings, edited by Anita Pacheco, had been available when I first began teaching courses in early modern British literature in the early 1990s. In those early years, I eagerly set about creating syllabi for courses on Shakespeare and other Tudor-Stuart literature that incorporated texts by contemporary women as well as men. As I quickly discovered, however, nearly all of the authors I wanted students to read were not yet available in easily acquired and affordable student editions or ready-made anthologies containing a significant number of women writers in lengthy excerpts or even full texts. Instead of simply ordering a half dozen or so items from the bookstore, finding suitable texts became a major endeavor, as I gathered course packs of materials photocopied from the Wing microfilm collection and printouts from the newly developing Brown Women Writers Project, which had yet to go online.