Riverrun acquires Targoff's story of Renaissance women writers

Riverrun has acquired a book by Ramie Targoff unearthing the stories of four Renaissance female writers.

Publisher Jon Riley bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Zoë Pagnamenta at the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency and Shakespeare’s Sisters will be published in autumn 2022.

Its synopsis states: “Targoff restores a crucial missing chapter in the love story of women and writing, unearthing the lives of four ambitious women who, against all odds, made themselves heard—and read—in the time of Shakespeare.  Taken together, Targoff’s biographies of Mary Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary and Anne Clifford makes the book something of a Renaissance Bloomsbury story, in which these four women both directly and indirectly helped shape one another’s careers and together formed a formidable group of early feminist writers.”

Riverrun is also planning to publish an anthology of work by Herbert, Lanyer, Cary and Clifford to accompany the book’s publication.

Riley said: “Ramie Targoff is able to convey her scholarship and passion for her subject with elegance and style. Shakespeare’s Sisters will be a work of importance and intense appeal to readers hungry for new narratives about writers and literary history.”

Targoff heads the Humanities Center at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and is the author of Renaissance Woman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a biography of Vittoria Colonna. She said: “I am thrilled to have found a home for this book with Jon Riley and his colleagues at riverrun, who have already brought such extraordinary enthusiasm and energy to the project. It’s truly an honor to be working with them.”