10 Female Writers Who Flourished During Shakespeare's Time

Virginia Woolf once argued that women couldn't have been writers in Shakespeare's era. She believed that even the most intelligent women were excluded from the great historical movements, and in her 1928 lecture, A Room of One's Own, she suggested that if Shakespeare had a sister with equal talent, she would have been doomed to obscurity and domesticity while her brother rose to fame.

Woolf's perspective couldn't have been more off the mark.

Women were an essential part of the 16th- and 17th-century literary world, creating and publishing works side by side with their male counterparts. Yet, a century after Woolf's time, many of their names remain forgotten. Here are 10 women who were Shakespeare's literary equals—not his sisters, but his contemporaries.

1. Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639)

Move aside, Shakespeare—women were playwrights too. Though it was never staged during her lifetime, Elizabeth Cary is celebrated for The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), the first known play in English penned and published by a woman. The play’s central character, Mariam, is the wife of the Biblical king Herod, who slaughtered her family to secure his rule over Judaea.

2. Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587)

Everyone is familiar with Mary Stuart—but did you know she was also a poet? During her 19-year imprisonment in England, imposed by her cousin Elizabeth I, their infamous rivalry became the subject of many films (the latest starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie). Yet, Mary’s poetic talents are often overlooked. Many of her works express her sorrow and solitude in captivity. In one sonnet penned the year of her execution, she captures her state of mind, describing herself as:

"...a body without a heart,a mere shadow, a victim of fateWho has nothing left in life but death."

3. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621)

The Countess of Pembroke found herself drawn into writing when her brother, the poet Philip Sidney, passed away, leaving behind a collection of unfinished work. In finishing these pieces, Pembroke also began to compose her own, including elegies for her late brother and The Tragedy of Antonie (1595), a translation of the French play Marc-Antoine (1578) by Robert Garnier—an influence on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

4. Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651)

Mary Wroth's relationship with her cousin, William Herbert, served as the central inspiration for her sweeping romance—the first of its kind in English by a woman—The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621). Wroth was the niece of the Countess of Pembroke and Philip Sidney, proving that literary talent clearly ran in the family!

5. Anne Lock (1533 – ca. 1590)

In 1560, Anne Lock became the first person—whether man or woman—to publish an English sonnet sequence. With A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, she outpaced Shakespeare by almost 50 years!

6. Isabella Whitney (ca. 1546 – ca. 1624)

While many Renaissance writers (Shakespeare excluded) didn’t make a living from their writing, Isabella Whitney was the first professional Englishwoman writer (though some sources credit Aphra Behn with this title, Whitney was writing for a living nearly a century before Behn). Her poem “To Her Unconstant Lover” speaks from the perspective of a woman addressing her unfaithful lover. It draws some inspiration from Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of poems that give voice to mythological women abandoned by their lovers and husbands. Whitney may have married around 1580, but earlier in her life, she wrote in a poem that, unbound by the traditional roles of women in the home, she devoted herself entirely to her writing:

"Had I a husband, or a house,        and all that [be]longs thereto,My self could frame about to rouse,        as other women do:But till some household cares me tie,My books and pen I will apply."

7. Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645)

In her proto-feminist poetry collection, 1611’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail God, King of the Jews), Aemilia Lanyer critiques the common tendency to blame women and holds them accountable for their share in human suffering. In the title poem, Lanyer recounts how Pontius Pilate sentenced Christ to death despite his wife’s warning that it was a grave mistake.

8. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)

Elizabeth was not only a patron of Shakespeare; she was a writer in her own right. Along with composing letters, translations, and speeches, the Virgin Queen wrote poetry reflecting on her life and reign. One of her notable works, “On Monsieur’s Departure,” is a poignant farewell to the French Duke of Anjou, whom she courted but never married.

9. Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)

Margaret Cavendish was the first woman to attend the Royal Society of London, engaging in intellectual debates and challenging the ideas of prominent philosophers and scientists like Thomas Hobbes and Robert Hooke. Combining her passion for science with her writing, she became one of the earliest English authors of science fiction. In her 1666 work, The Blazing World, she imagined herself as the empress of a fantastical realm, overseeing scientific discoveries among its strange, humanoid inhabitants.

10. Lucy Hutchinson (1618-1681)

Lucy Hutchinson had a keen interest in science. She was the first to translate De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), a 1st-century BCE poem about atoms by the Roman philosopher Lucretius, into English. Later, she distanced herself from the translation, rejecting it for conflicting with her Puritan beliefs, but her remarkable accomplishment endures.