Jacobean women’s writing flourished in spite and perhaps even because of King James, whose authoritarian politics sometimes galvanized female resistance. Like their male contemporaries, women writers found both direct and indirect means to criticize James, often by appealing to royal women. Overall women’s literacy expanded amid a growing print marketplace, and a burgeoning Reformation culture of scriptural reading and exegesis provided tools for women’s writing. Since social class was the primary determinant of women’s education and therefore of their reading and writing literacy, most Jacobean women writers came from the upper echelons of society. While representing only about 0.5% of total publications during this period, women who went into print despite its attendant risks included Elizabeth Cary, who produced the first original female-authored tragedy written in English; Dorothy Leigh, whose mother’s advice book was an early modern bestseller; Aemilia Lanyer, who built a community of female patrons around a woman-centered devotional poem; and Mary Wroth, who penned an epic romance of five hundred and ninety thousand words that scandalized her contemporaries. This figure does not include women’s manuscript writing and its ever-expanding archive of letters, account books, advice, culinary writing, religious meditations, sermon notes, miscellanies, and verse. Representations of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, by Edward Denny, Wroth, and Lanyer illuminate perceptions of a generational shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean women’s writing.