Shakespeare's Sister — Doris Gwaltney

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, wrote: "Let us imagine. . .what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. . .as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was." What would it have been like if a woman had attempted to follow her brother's footsteps and travel to London to loin the theater and write plays? And what if it were she, not her brother Will, who had really written Romeo and Juliet? What was it really like to be a woman in Shakespeare's world? In this imaginative and wholly fascinating novel, we have the rollicking, humorous, and sometimes dangerous answer to those questions.

In Shakespeare's Sister, Doris Gwaltney has made Elizabethan society come alive, in all its glory and squalor, its speech, manners, and customs. And she has also forged a truly inspirational and touching story of a woman struggling to do what she loves-in a world where women were little more than the property of men, and if you wanted to follow your dreams, you had better be, or pretend to be, a man.