num_pages: 331
description: Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the worlds 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 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 Bront; 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 alwaysuntil nowtantalizingly consigned to the shadows.
language: English
title: A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
publisher: Mariner Books