Virginia Woolf

The story of Shakespeares sister that Virginia Woolf tells in A Room of Ones 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 Woolfs 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 first collection of essays to explore Woolfs Renaissance, Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance reflects an important interdisciplinary development: contributors include Renaissance as well as twentiethcentury specialists. Part of a larger movement to explore the intellectual currents shaping our literary and cultural inheritance, these essays speak to a community of readers that includes, in addition to Woolf and Renaissance scholars, anyone interested in the deep roots of modernism, womens studies, or literary history itself.