My Thoughts

“... misleading myths of isolation have long attached themselves to women who write: a
cottage-dwelling spinster; an impassioned roamer of the moors; a fallen woman, shunned; a melancholic genius. Over the years, a conspiracy of silence has obscured the friendships of female authors, past and present. But now it is time to break the silence and celebrate this literary sisterhood - a glimmering web of interwoven threads that still has the power to unsettle, to challenge, to inspire.”

‘A Secret Sisterhood’ is an interesting book packed with loads of information, new insights and wonderful descriptions of friendship from times long gone. Reading more like a biography, it allows the reader to look at female literary friendships within the context of their writing.

Being a big Austen and Bronte fan, I was eager to see what new snippets would be brought to life. Thinking of these famous female authors (and understanding that writing is very much a solitary pursuit), one often sees them in isolation. This book reveals how much they were actively involved with others, sharing at times, revealing insights into their thinking. Either meeting in person or through their correspondence, one can learn a great deal more about the individual.

You do not have to be well versed on these writers, as a satisfactory amount of detail is provided by these authors. What they succeed in doing is portraying another aspect to these famous lives and how these friendships contributed to the writer’s lives. I learnt more about those I knew well eg. Jane Austen and was introduced to those I was unfamiliar with eg. George Eliot.

This is an extremely well researched book, impressively so. Dedicating three chapters to each of the writer’s, the authors shine a light on the importance of friendship to these famous women, through diaries, letters and other documents. The authors really do a fabulous job of inviting you into a ‘secret sisterhood’ and sharing details I knew little of.

If you are in any way intrigued by any of these literary heroines, or you are interested in literary history, then I highly recommend you take some time to discover this ‘Secret Sisterhood’.

“In piecing together the lost stories of these four trailblazing pairs, we have found alliances that were sometimes illicit, scandalous, and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical, or inspiring but, until now, tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.”


This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher and provided through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The quoted material may have changed in the final release

Writers Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney were teaching in Japan when they met. They immediately connected and soon were regularly meeting and critiquing each other's writing.

As they collaborated on writing A Secret Sisterhood, they found happiness in spite of the stress. Their unfounded feared was that their 'bond between equals' would be threatened if one achieved success before the other.

When Margaret Atwood offered to write the forward for the book, it was proof that women writers do forge friendships of encouragement and support, in spite of historic stereotypes.

Jane Austen was mythologized into a happy spinster who hid her writing and relied only on her sister for support. Suppressed was her friendship with her rich brother's impoverished governess Anne Sharp, an amateur playwright.

Charlotte Bronte's friendship with boarding school friend Mary Taylor had its ups and downs, but it was Taylor who inspired Charlotte to travel abroad to continue her education. The intrepid Taylor became a feminist writer.

George Eliot, living 'in sin' with a married man, corresponded with clergyman's daughter and literary sensation Harriet Beecher Stowe. Over years, their closeness was stressed by life events, yet their regard for each other as artists prevailed.

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield are remembered as rivals, their mutual regard and friendship overshadowed.

A Secret Sisterhood was an interesting book about the "rare sense of communion" between literary friends. One does not need to be well informed about the writers discussed for enough biographical information is included to understand the friendships in context of the authors' personal and professional lives.

I enjoyed the book and learned something about writers I am quite familiar with and a great deal about those I knew little.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Excellent! I learned a lot of interesting things about some of my favorite authors, and the writing kept me engaged through every page

"Once people become famous their images tend to congeal. They become engravings of themselves, and we think of them as always having been grown-up and respectable. A Secret Sisterhood reminds us that this is not the case. Sweeney and Midorikawa take us back to formative years, retrace forgotten footsteps, and tap into emotional undercurrents in these writers that we had not suspected. These four women, however iconic they have now become, were not two-dimensional icons, nor were they plaster angels: they were real people, with all the neediness, anxiety, ardor, and complexity that come with the territory." - Excerpted from Margaret Atwood's Introduction

I can't say it better than Margaret Atwood, and why should I try?! I immensely enjoyed reading about the four friendships that this book explores. I definitely have a certain congealed image of all of these women, and I loved the opportunity to dismantle my own expectations. All of the friendships detailed have been either expunged completely from the historical imagination or cast as antagonistic (any strife or competition between female authors = enemies). It's definitely time that we acknowledge the complicated, unruly reality of these famous women (and so many more), and investigate how their previously ignored female friendships impacted their work and their legacies.

I especially loved that this was researched and written by a pair of female writers who are willing to sit with the uncomfortable parts of their own competitive and supportive relationship.

"Misleading myths of isolation have long attached themselves to women who write: a cottage-dwelling spinster; an impassioned roamer of the moors; a fallen woman, shunned; a melancholic genius. Over the years, a conspiracy of silence has obscured the friendships of female authors, past and present. But now it is time to break the silence and celebrate this literary sisterhood — a glimmering web of interwoven threads that still has the power to unsettle, to challenge, to inspire." (Praise hands emoji)

I have been so looking forward to reading this book! However, my kindle will not accept the file so I cannot access it! Thank you for the opportunity Netgalley!

I love, love, love the premise of A Secret Sisterhood! As Emma Claire Sweeny and Emily Midorikawa point out, the friendships and friendly rivalries between female authors have been largely ignored by academics and popular history. The friendships the authors chose to research cover a great span of literature and there is sure to be at least one pairing that will appeal to just about every reader: Jane Austen and Anne Sharp; Charlotte Bronte and Mary Taylor; George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.
I expected to be most enthralled by the chapters about Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. I was pleasantly surprised to find the chapter I loved the most explored the friendship between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed reading about Katherine Mansfield and Virgina Woolf.
I loved the epilogue: getting a glimpse of the authors' real life friendship was gratifying.
I appreciate the scholarship and research that went into A Secret Sisterhood. I also liked that the partial biography was thorough enough to allow for significant further exploration.

I'm a sucker for ANYTHING related to the Bronte sisters so of course I was excited to read this. I wasn't sure about it once I was done though. It felt sensationalist, somehow.

A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot, and Woolf is a very interesting read. When four literary greats are the subjects in a single book, it can't help but be compelling. Friends are a very important aspect of people’s lives. The friendship described in this book and how it impacted the lives of these women is so fascinating and yet little was known about it primarily because of their gender. The authors did a superb job with their research and allowed the reader to get reacquainted with these famous authors on a more personal level. This is a wonderful read, especially for those who have cherished the works of these authors.

Comprising brief dual-biographies of 8 women, the premise of this book is that female literary friendships have been written out, submerged or forgotten from the lives of four women authors: Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Woolf.

Reading the book, I'm not especially convinced by this argument: the relationship between Bronte and Mary Taylor is well covered in the standard biographies, as is the sometimes conflicted relationship between Woolf and Katherine Mansfield and, indeed, other Bloomsbury women. While I didn't know about the connections between Eliot and Harriet Beecher-Stowe, or the friendship between Austen and Anne Sharp, the governess of her niece, Fanny, I'm not sure that knowing that they were friends changes anything. <i> Of course</i> women have friends, whether they're writers or not and, while it's true that there is some continued mythologising about masculine literary friendships (Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Fitzgerald and Hemingway), it tends to be because of the <i> literary</i> connections being made in their writing, not just the fact that they are friends. The only possible literary cross-fertilisation here is that between Woolf and Mansfield, already part of literary history via the interconnections of the Bloomsbury Group.

Having said that, this is a lively and well-researched read that offers up compact 'friendship' biographies in just 3 chapters each. I, however, expected something more than the mere fact of these friendships to be the subject of the book: a more probing interrogation of the impact of these friendships and their effect on the writings of these women. To be fair, this isn't claiming to be an academic book or to be making intellectual interventions in the histories of gender and writing. So an interesting read but also a bit of a wasted opportunity that might have done something more radical with the material: 3.5 stars.

A Secret Sisterhood is a look at the friendships that some of the best known female writers had with other women who wrote and how these affected their lives. It sets out to show the importance of the support, rivalry, and inspiration that characterises famous male literary friendships to these authors, in friendships that have been often overlooked by biographers and critics. The writers, real-life friends, emphasise how these friendships are a major part of literary history and suggest by the end that more female literary friendships should be appreciated and studied, to compare with famous male ones like Byron and Shelley or Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

The book is very much literary history, focused upon the writers’ lives and mentioning a great deal of other writers and literary trends on the way. It is split into four sections, covering each of the writers named in the subtitle and their relationship with a particular other female writer in their life. Reading it does not require a huge familiarity with each writer, making it accessible to those with an interest in writers, but who don’t necessarily know a huge deal about the lives of the individuals covered already. There is quoting from letters and diaries to give detail of these friendships, but no literary analysis of the writers. Instead, it is very much biography, opening the way for people to look at these and other female literary friendships in the context of their writing and specific elements of their texts.

A Secret Sisterhood is an enjoyable book about lesser known literary history and an important one for showing that female writers do not have to either be reclusive and isolated, or tightly bound to a man without female support.