This study demonstrates the extent to which reading and writing were gendered acts in 16th- and early 17th-century England. Renaissance gender ideology did not prevent women from writing altogether, but it affected all writing by creating different standards of acceptability for female writers than for their male counterparts. Lamb explores the effect of this gendered ideology of authors in a famous Renaissance family - the Sidneys: Sir Philip Sidney, his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and his niece, Mary Wroth, two notable and productive women authors of the time. Unlike other works which analyze gender only in terms of women"s writing, Mary Lamb explores gender as a determining force in the works of both men and women of the Sidney circle.