A secret sisterhood : the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontė, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
/ Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney ; foreword by Margaret Atwood
- Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt , 2017
- 331 p. : illus. ; 22 cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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 Brontė; 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.
English.
9780544883734
Austen, Jane (1775-1817) ----Friends and associates Eliot, George (1819-1880) ----Friends and associates Brontė, Charlotte (1816-1855) ----Friends and associates Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941) ----Friends and associates
Women artists---England----Biography Novelists Female friendship Women and literature