Jenni Maitland

Emilia took our wooden ‘O’ by storm in late 2018, celebrating women’s voices the world over through the story of a trailblazing, forgotten woman, Emilia Bassano. 400 years ago, Emilia wanted her voice to be heard. In 1611 she penned the words to her ‘Vertuous Reader’ as part of a volume of radical, feminist and subversive poetry. Yet the little we know now of Emilia is restricted to the possibility that she may have been the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets – and the rest of her story has been erased by history. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s acclaimed play revealed the life of Emilia: writer, wife, lover, mother, muse.