| Popis: |
Virginia Woolf’s thought experiment—or fiction—of Judith Shakespeare was part of a larger investigation of the problem of ‘women and fiction’. This chapter returns to this problem with an investigation of the different ways that early modern women were associated with fiction: as patrons, addressees, readers, writers, and theorists. This chapter provides an overview of women’s participation in fiction in the earlier part of the seventeenth century. The examples of Margaret Tyler and Mary Sidney Herbert demonstrate women’s influence on the development of early modern fiction as translators, editors, and co-authors. Further, the association of women and fiction in the period created ‘women and fiction’ as a complex of ideas that shaped women’s engagement with fiction as both readers and writers. This chapter analyses Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish’s fictional works, demonstrating how these writers developed theories about the power of fiction to reflect and shape the conditions of women’s lives. |
