A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontė, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf - Hardcover

Midorikawa, Emily; Sweeney, Emma Claire

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 054488373X ISBN 13: 9780544883734

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Author

Writers and friends EMILY MIDORIKAWA and EMMA CLAIRE SWEENEY co-run the website SomethingRhymed.com. Emma is author of the novel Owl Song at Dawn, Emily is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize, and they both teach at New York University in London.

About the Author

EMILY MIDORIKAWA’s work has been published in the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, and the Times. She is a winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and was a runner-up in the SI Leeds Literary Prize (judged by Margaret Busby) and the Yeovil Literary Prize (judged by Tracy Chevalier). She has a history degree from University College London, and is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing masters program. She teaches at New York University–London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 054488373X
• ISBN 13: 9780544883734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352