Suzanne Trill’s Inaugural Lecture

News article published by Cordelia Beattie, Suzanne Trill on 31 October 2025  events

As part of her inaugural lecture, 'Beyond “Shakespeare’s Sister”: Writing Women and Literary Culture, c. 1580–1700', Suzanne Trill, will be speaking about Alice Thornton.

This event will be in-person: 5.15pm-6.30pm, November 5, 2025. Lecture Theatre G.03, 50 George Square.

Tickets are free and available via the link above or by scanning the QR code in the image.

Overview

Virginia Woolf’s fictional figure of “Shakespeare’s Sister” has long symbolised women’s exclusion from literary history. Yet the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were full of women who wrote, and of women whose lives and words were written about, contested, and reshaped by others. Recent scholarship has begun to move beyond models of loss and (re)discovery and urges us instead fully to recognise women’s participation in early modern literary culture.

This lecture takes up that challenge by focusing on three such women: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke; Anne, Lady Halkett; and Alice Thornton. All three were committed Protestants whose works were shaped by — and in turn helped shape — the political and religious upheavals of their day. Their works challenge our assumptions about who belongs to the literary tradition and demonstrate the importance of collaborative literary production, both in the seventeenth-century and beyond.