New Yorker magazine names Brandeis faculty book among best of 2024

Brandeis Stories

New Yorker magazine names Brandeis faculty book among best of 2024

By Laura Gardner, P'12
December 11, 2024

The New Yorker magazine has named "Shakespeare's Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance," by professor Ramie Targoff as one of the best books of 2024.

The magazine praised the book as a "thoughtful study" about four women living in Shakespeare's time who, despite all the myriad societal barriers hindering their literary ambitions, managed to write, and write brilliantly.

"Against the backdrop of Elizabethan England - think smallpox and bubonic plague, banishments and beheadings, conspiracies and kidnappings, and the staggering extravagance of royal weddings and funerals - [Targoff] weaves together the lives and literary accomplishments of Elizabeth Cary and three other talented Renaissance women, for whom writing was not just a life force but a lifeline," wrote Sarah Baldwin in a Brandeis Magazine feature last summer.

Targoff, the Jehuda Reinharz Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and co-chair of Italian studies at Brandeis, is a scholar of the English and Italian Renaissance. She has written on the invention of common prayer; on the works of the metaphysical poet John Donne; on the history of love poetry in Italy and England; and authored a critically acclaimed biography of Italian poet Vittoria Colonna, as well as a translation of Colonna's 1538 Rime, the first book of poetry by a woman ever published in Italy. She received many accolades for "Shakespeare's Sisters," including in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and the Times Literary Supplement. But the New Yorker recognition is especially meaningful, she said.

"As a life-longer reader of The New Yorker - I actually got my first subscription when I was 12 - I was thrilled to see this," she said. "Recovering the voices of women, and the role they played in history, is a priority of my intellectual work, and so any publicity I can bring to these extraordinary women writers who were forgotten for hundreds of years is deeply gratifying."

Drawing on years of research, Targoff wrote "Shakespeare's Sisters" with a lively narrative designed to appeal to not just a scholarly readership, but a general audience. Growing interest in the last decade or so among readers in "forgotten voices and marginalized figures from the past," also contributed to its broad appeal, said Targoff.

"I always kept my ideal readers in mind - and in this case, my imaginary readers were the amazing women in my book group of 25 years, none of whom is an academic but all of whom love to read," Targoff said. "Sharing what I know about the past with my readers, and doing it in as lively and engaging a way as possible, was my goal."