Susanne Woods, provost and professor of English at Wheaton College, Massachusetts, founded the Brown University Women Writers Project. She has been professor of English and also served in academic administration at Brown University and Franklin and Marshall College. Her publications include Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (Huntington Lib., 1984) and Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford UP, 1999). With Elizabeth H. Hageman she is co-general editor of the Oxford University Press series Women Writers in English, 1350-1850, for which she edited The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer (1993). Margaret P. Hannay, professor of English literature at Siena College, has edited The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke with Noel J. Kinnamon and Michael G. Brennan (Clarendon, 1998). She is the author of Philip's Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford UP, 1990) and editor of Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent State UP, 1985).
The increased attention to women's literature of the early modern period has reinvigorated literary study, not by supplanting the traditional canon but by renewing our interest in it. This summarises the latest scholarship on British women writers who lived from roughly 1500 to 1700 and suggests strategies for presenting their works in the classroom. Thirty-six essays discuss frequently anthologised pieces as well as the writings of women who have come to the notice of scholars only recently.