Sharon L. Jansen

For more than thirty years, I have guided college readers through some of the most well-known texts of the Western literary canon: "The Iliad," "Beowulf," Dante's "The Divine Comedy," Wyatt and Surrey's Petrarchan sonnets, Shakespeare's plays, Milton's "Paradise Lost." I am not always successful—one recent student, encountering Beowulf for the first time, told me that she found him to be as "loathsome" as the monster Grendel. Even so, that unfortunate experience didn't deter her from taking another class where we read Christine de Pizan's "The Book of the City of Ladies" together. My Beowulf-loathing student suddenly fell in love with medieval literature.

As this student's response shows, newly rediscovered works by women writers have changed the discipline of English literature, and I've enjoyed teaching courses that incorporate these texts: "Five Feminist Classics," "Medieval Women Writers," "Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers," and, most recently, "Reading Women's Worlds," a course that eventually resulted in a book, published under the same title. Along with my students, I've read and enjoyed the lyrics of Sappho, the prison writing of Perpetua of Carthage, the sparkling romances of Marie de France, the spiritual writings of mystics from Hildegard of Bingen to Teresa of Įvila, the love lyrics of Lady Mary Wroth, and the witty, gender-bending comedies of Margaret Cavendish.

My research and writing spans these same two poles. I have written both traditional political history of the reign of Henry VIII as well as a counternarrative of that history, focusing on women, politics, and power in the sixteenth century. More recently, as I have noted, I have explored the theme of women writers imagining "rooms of their own," and I've examined contemporary issues in a series of personal essays on women, gender, and popular culture.

All of this work has been published with the interested general reader in mind. As one recent reviewer commented about "Reading Women's Worlds," "Jansen does what she does best, that is pull us into the story and help us understand her interpretation. Reading this new work, I felt as though I was becoming re-acquainted with an old friend sharing her new knowledge. Jansen has brought her informative conversational style that was so well done in her earlier works to this new discussion of women and their texts."