Jane Sharp

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JS , who published in 1671, stands in a line of militant midwife-writers, close to Elizabeth Cellier before her and followed after a longer lapse of time by Elizabeth Nihell . Like theirs, her text is proto-feminist.
Photograph of the title-page of "The Midwives Book, or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered", 1671, by Jane Sharp (in its slightly differently titled third edition, 1674).

Milestones

May 1671

JS 's textbook The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered . . . was entered in the Term Catalogues. It was published that year, dedicated to the Celebrated Midwives of Great Britain and Ireland, whom Sharp calls her sisters.
Hobby, Elaine. “’Some Things more Material to be Known’: Reading Some Books for the Recovery Project”. Expanding the Canon of Early Modern Women’s Writing, edited by Paul Salzman, Cambridge Scholars Press, pp. 12-32.
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Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book. Simon Miller.
title-page

1725

A fourth, heavily revised edition of JS 's textbook of 1671 appeared, as The Complete Midwife's Companion, with her name on the title-page.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

September 1728

A new edition of The Midwives Book, JS 's textbook of 1671, was reported.
London, April. Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge University Press.

Biography

Obscure Origins

From what she says about her career, JS must have been born before about 1620.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

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