City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

A secret sisterhood, the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, & Virginia Woolf, Emily Midorikawa & Emma Claire Sweeney

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

portraitsplatesillustrations

index present

non fiction

A secret sisterhood

bibliography

Emily Midorikawa & Emma Claire Sweeney

the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, & Virginia Woolf

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 Bronté; 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

Literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, & Virginia WoolLiterary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, and Virginia Wool