What Virginia Woolf Got Wrong About Lady Anne Clifford

In her 1929 feminist manifesto, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf explored the reasons why over the centuries women had written so little compared to men. “A woman must have money and a room of her own,” she famously pronounced, “if she is to write fiction.” In lectures originally given in 1928 at Newnham and Girton Colleges (both women’s colleges at Cambridge University), Woolf described her own circumstances—she had already written Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse—as a direct result of having inherited £500 a year from an aunt who died after falling off her horse in Bombay. Woolf got the news of her aunt’s gift around the same time that women were given the vote, in early 1918. “Of the two—the vote and the money,” she declared, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.”

The most celebrated part of A Room of One’s Own isn’t Woolf’s outrage over either women’s erasure from the history books or the second-class treatment they receive in almost all aspects of their lives. What most readers remember from Woolf’s polemical work is her account of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith. If there had been a Judith Shakespeare endowed with a talent like her brother’s, Woolf warned, she would have met with the darkest of fates.

“Any woman,” she exclaimed, “born with a great gift in the sixteenth 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.” For in spite of her genius, Judith Shakespeare “would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity.” Had any woman survived these conditions, Woolf concluded that “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination.”

Woolf had good reasons for her pessimism. To be a woman in Shakespeare’s England was to live a drastically reduced life. Girls were rarely permitted to go to grammar schools and were never allowed to attend university. Before marriage, they were supposed to serve and obey their fathers. Once married, women’s obedience shifted to their husbands, who assumed possession of their wives’ personal property and became their legal guardians under a doctrine called “coverture,” which literally meant women were “covered” by the legal fiction that husbands and wives were one person. (This arrangement lasted until the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870.)

Renaissance women could not hold political office or vote. They could not become lawyers or doctors. They could not appear onstage in theaters. They were supposed to keep quiet in public, and disruptive behavior could lead them to be brandished as “scolds” and paraded through the streets wearing a heavy iron muzzle known as a “scold’s bridle.” Despite all of these restrictions and hardships, however, some women did learn their letters, read voraciously, and then take up the pen themselves. They weren’t encouraged, and they rarely found even a shred of acclaim, but there were some women who managed to write.

When Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, she knew almost nothing about the powerful literary works a small group of women had written—and in many cases, published—around the time of Shakespeare. These brilliant poems and plays, translations and histories, had been lost or forgotten for centuries. But Woolf had recently encountered one of these women’s writing, which she peremptorily dismissed as trivial. In 1923, Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West published the early diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, who had lived with her first husband, Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, at Sackville-West’s childhood home at Knole. Sackville-West saw in Anne a kindred spirit, a fellow reader and writer who was dissatisfied with the prescriptive role English society had carved out for her, and who had heroically found a way to fight back.

In 1605, the fifteen-year-old Anne Clifford, an aristocratic girl raised with all imaginable privileges of birth and wealth, was disinherited from one of the largest properties in England. Her father, George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, a dashing courtier who was the Queen’s Champion at the annual Accession Day jousts, had squandered away most of his money in his gambling debts and privateering ventures (he was famous for his capture of San Juan, Puerto Rico). When George died, he passed on both his debts and his vast estates, totaling roughly 90,000 acres, not to Anne—his only surviving child—but to his brother, Sir Francis Clifford.

Anne’s response was to wage what would become one of the greatest inheritance battles England had ever seen, a nearly forty-year legal fight that brought her into direct conflict with the most powerful men in the kingdom. From her dramatic showdown in King James’s private chambers at Whitehall Palace where, pressured to accept a substantial cash settlement, she brazenly declared to the king that she would never give up her lands “under any condition whatsoever,” to her trespassing on her uncle’s estates on horseback to persuade his tenants not to pay their rent; from her suffering at the hands of her profligate husband, who abandoned her for long stretches of time with the hope Anne would break down and put an end to her lawsuit, to her social ostracization from other ladies at court; through all of this, and much more, Anne kept herself going by keeping a diary. When she finally gained her father’s lands after the death of her uncle and his only son, she also expanded her great diaristic project to write both a full memoir of her life and a massive history of the Clifford family from the Norman conquest through the present.

Anne would no doubt have been thrilled to know that a woman like Vita Sackville-West brought her writing back into the world. She would have been less pleased with Virginia Woolf’s response. In her 1931 essay “Donne After Three Centuries,” Woolf laid out the little she knew about Renaissance women writers. “If they wrote themselves,” she claimed,

and it is said that both Lady Pembroke and Lady Bedford were poets of merit, they did not dare to put their names to what they wrote, and it has vanished. But a diary here and there survives from which we may see the patroness more closely and less romantically.

“A diary here and there” brought Woolf to Anne, whom she described as “practical and little educated,” someone who painstakingly restored her castles but “never attempted to set up a salon or to found a library.” “A great heiress,” Anne was “infected with all the passion of her age for lands and houses, busied with all the cares of wealth and property.” She may have “read good English books as naturally as she ate good beef and mutton,” but in Woolf’s estimation, Anne’s writing didn’t deserve our attention.

Sackville-West saw it differently. She admired Anne’s “sharp, vigorous mind, that had, so humanly, its sentimental facet on the opposite side to all its severity.” She sympathized with Anne’s early struggles—“restrained on the one hand by the severe and virtuous influence of an ever-present mother, and coloured on the other hand by the fable of an adventurous and almost legendary father”—and she conjured up the “neat and meticulous child, keeping her accounts in a note-book with that precision which followed her throughout life.” She applauded the old woman (Anne lived to eighty-six) who kept her diary “with the same scrupulous care up to the day before her death,” filling the pages with a fascinating combination of “gossip,” “strong family feelings,” “texts and maxims,” and above all “coincidences,” which she would “turn happily down any little by-path in order to ferret…out.”

That Woolf couldn’t grasp what was thrilling about Anne’s diaries reflects her own tastes and biases—a topic beyond our interest here—but it also gives us a different perspective on the reasons she thought Judith Shakespeare couldn’t have practiced her art. For it turns out Woolf’s doomed vision of women writers in Renaissance England was horribly mistaken. Although she claimed to have heard of “Lady Pembroke” (whom she might more respectfully have called by her own name, Mary Sidney), she seems never to have read a word of either Mary’s dazzling verse translation of the Psalms or her beautiful poems to Queen Elizabeth. She almost certainly hadn’t heard of Aemilia Lanyer, the first Englishwoman to publish a book of original poetry in the seventeenth century, whose brilliant poem, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” offers a feminist retelling of both Eve’s fall and the Crucifixion.

Woolf likewise knew nothing about Elizabeth Cary, whose stunning tragedy recounting the murder of the ancient Jewish princess Mariam at the hands of her tyrannical husband, Herod, was the first original play to be published by a woman in England. Revisiting many of the themes of Shakespeare’s Othello written just a few years before, The Tragedy of Mariam bravely affirms a woman’s right to follow her own conscience and speak her mind at whatever cost.

Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford were among a small but not insignificant group of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who did what Woolf deemed impossible: they wrote works of poetry, history, religion, and drama when none was encouraged from their kind. They weren’t professional writers who earned an income from their works, and however wealthy they may have been—three of these four women were very rich—they were far from free to dedicate as much time as they’d like to writing. Each had husbands and children to care for and households to run; they enjoyed bursts of great productivity and were beset by periods of stagnation; they wrote when their circumstances allowed.

And yet, whatever limitations these women faced, their writing largely defined who they were and how they wanted to be remembered. Against all odds they found rooms of their own, if only to be buried inside them with their writing for hundreds of years before the doors were finally torn down.

Shakespeare’s Sisters opens up Renaissance history to four extraordinary women for whom writing was their life force. Once we learn about these women and read their books after centuries of neglect, it’s not only their names that we recover. Suddenly, there are new voices. We hear from teenage girls married off to men they would never have chosen; wives forced to tolerate their husbands’ spending their money and taking lovers; mothers whose babies died before their first birthday, or whose children were taken away by their fathers as punishment for wifely disobedience. We hear from widows filing their own lawsuits in Chancery Court, opening charities and schools, traveling for pleasure to Europe, building their own houses, and erecting monuments. We hear a woman’s perspective on the killing of Mary, Queen of Scots and the Spanish Armada; the Protestant wars in the Netherlands and the witchcraft trials in England and Scotland; the ongoing persecution of Catholics and the outbreak of the Civil War.

We realize that however much we thought we knew about the Renaissance, it was only half the story. We begin to understand how much we’ve been missing.

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From Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance by Ramie Targoff. Copyright © 2024. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.