Did women have a Renaissance? Over the last decade much of the most eminent and significant scholarship in Renaissance studies has attempted to answer this question. Kim Walker's Women Writers of the English Renaissance takes a commanding lead among the responses.

In a careful, current, and wide-ranging survey of Renaissance women writers, Walker examines the social, educational, economic, and ideological constraints under which women wrote; their attempts to move from the margin to the center of literary production; and their establishment of careers as professional writers. Both major and minor writers - poets, diarists, letter writers, romance writers, playwrights, and biographers - are discussed here in revealing, reliable, and provocative ways. Major writers including Mary Sidney, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Wroth are presented in a new, more broad perspective.

Walker's synthesis of cultural history and literary criticism makes this volume a significant accomplishment that should be read by every scholar and student of the culture and literature of Tudor and Stuart England.