A-Level English Masterclass 2024

Only a handful of women are commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. Yet other female authors – some from as early as Shakespeare’s time – are waiting to be discovered elsewhere in the Abbey. Aphra Behn, the first professional female playwright, is buried in the cloisters; others are hidden in plain sight as wives and daughters sharing monuments to men, including Margaret Cavendish, a prolific, daring and experimental author, and Dorothy Osborne, a vivacious letter-writer. Even Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, better known to us as monarchs, were also skilful poets; while Elizabeth Russell, an Elizabethan aristocrat, expressed herself by composing moving inscriptions for her husband’s tomb. This talk will explore the extraordinary lives and achievements of these women, and will show how we can find female authors if we look into the less obvious corners of the Abbey.

Helen Hackett

Helen Hackett is a Professor of English Literature at UCL. She has been active since the 1980s in researching and teaching works by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women. Her latest book is The Elizabethan Mind (Yale UP, 2022).