A Secret Sisterhood

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world’s best-loved female authors are usually portrayed as isolated eccentrics. Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney have, however, uncovered a wealth of hidden yet startling collaborations. A Secret Sisterhood looks at the friendships between Jane Austen and one of her household servants, playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor who shaped the work of the Bronte sisters; Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but in fact enjoyed a complex friendship fired by an underlying erotic charge. Through letters and diaries which have never been published before, the book will resurrect these hitherto forgotten stories of female friendships that were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring; but always, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows. The book came out of the author’s own friendship; they began their own blog called Something Rhymed which charts female friendships and has been covered in the media and promoted by Margaret Atwood, Sheila Hancock and Kate Mosse.