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A Secret Sisterhood

A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf is a book by two women who are writers and friends. These women, Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, set out to highlight some of the friendships between other women writers, and show how women have sustained each other’s personal and creative lives.

The concept of the book is better than its execution. In the case of Jane Austen’s friendship with a governess and playwright named Anne Sharp, there isn’t much information to go on. Even though each author only gets a few chapters, the Jane Austen chapters consist of a lot of speculation and filler. It’s fascinating, but could be shorter. I enjoyed the chapter about Charlotte Brontë, Ellen Nussey, and Mary Taylor, because Mary Taylor was such a dynamic figure that she gives that section of the book a great deal of energy.

I have to admit that I skimmed the sections about George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. In both cases I was fascinated by how prickly people navigated disagreements (sometimes well and sometimes very badly). However, I had a hard time getting invested. Presumably the reason I enjoyed the Bronte chapter was at least in part because it had more substance than the Austen chapter and I was already emotionally invested in the subject, whereas I don’t have a strong emotional interest in Woolf or Eliot. Ultimately, this book needed less filler and a more brisk pace to sustain my interest.

– Carrie S

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 mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of surprising collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Brontë; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship fired by an underlying erotic charge.
Through letters and diaries that have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these forgotten stories of female friendships. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always—until now—tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.