The sonnet was perhaps the characteristic literary genre of the early modern period, but it is a form primarily associated with the male voice. This entry considers the difficulties, but also the opportunities, which sonnets represented for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century female poet in England and Scotland. It discusses the precedents for women’s literary expression in the genre as set by Continental writers like Vittoria Colonna and Louise Labé and, drawing on the cases of Mary Wroth, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, and Anne Locke, it also looks at how association with a sonnet sequence could be used to discredit a woman. The other sonnet modes explored by women are also canvassed: sacred parody or spiritual Petrarchism, dedications, and translations, and the difficulties surrounding the establishment of a corpus of sonnets associated with women writers are considered.