“Any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would have certainly gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at”, wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own”. When discussing women’s intellectual freedom, Woolf imagined the horrors of the lives that came before her, curtailed by the constraints of gender. Her primary example was fictional: she imagined Judith, Shakespeare’s sis