Strange spaces of silence seem to separate one period of activity from another. There was Sapho and a little group of women all writing poetry on a Greek island before the birth of Christ. A long  silence followed. Then about the year 1,000 we find a certain court lady writing a very long and beautiful novel in Japan. But in England in the sixteenth century, when the dramatists and poets were most active, the women were dumb, Elizabethan literature is exclusively masculine. Then, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth century, we find women again writing-this time in England— with extraordinary frequency and success.