In this work, Jansen explores a recurring theme in writing by women:  the dream of finding or creating a private and secluded retreat from the world of men.  These imagined "women's worlds" may be very small, a single room, for example, but many women writers are much more ambitious, fantasizing about cities, even entire countries, created for and inhabited exclusively by women.

Sharon Jansen is the author of Anne of France: Lessons for My Daughter, The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe, and Dangerous Talk and Strange Behavior: Women and Popular Resistance to the Reforms to Henry VIII.