Book Review: A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf

by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, forward by Margaret Atwood

The abbreviated histories of four mavens of English literature are not intended as biographies. Nor is this book’s intent simply to showcase the existence of four literary friendships. The authors, Midorikawa and Sweeney, writers who share their own literary friendship, instead aim to correct common misperceptions about four extraordinary writers and the support and inspiration they found in friendships with other female writers.

Their extensive research must have been fascinating! Pouring over correspondence that had gone unexamined for decades, tucked away in back rooms of important libraries. They discovered intriguing gaps in the research caused by the destruction of letters by one or both of the writers—likely done to protect or themselves or their counterpart from future scrutiny. Like detectives or archaeologists, they puzzled over the assumed details of these writer’s private relationships to see if they jibed with the known facts of their lives.

We accept the importance of the friendship between Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, the drunken give and take between Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, the creative exchange between JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. But did you know of the transatlantic correspondence between George Eliot and Harriet Beecker-Stowe?

Over the years, I’ve studied the lives of Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austin, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Yet I never knew of friendships they fostered with other women writers (except that between Charlotte Bronte and her sisters.) Is this an oversight or a deliberate omission? In their time, women were not considered capable of intellectual thought. Their books? assumed to be merely unimportant pastoral romances. It is possible that these women worred that their critiques would be misunderstood and trivialized too. For whatever reason, these four friendships (and presumably others) have not been widely-remembered or extolled.

In A Secret Sisterhood, Midorikawa and Sweeney make assumptions that are impossible to verify. They chose to highlight certain friendships that supported their hypotheses while omitting others that did not. Throughout I wanted Midorikawa and Sweeney to cite additional examples where the literary friendships improved or changed an author’s output. Is it enough to know that famous female writers had literary friendships with other female writers? Perhaps. It is, at least, affirming to read about them. Maybe that’s enough.

The writing quality is superb. A heavily-researched book can become bogged down in uninteresting detail. This book did not. I found it pulled me through steadily. Its pacing was excellent. The foreword and epilogue both proved helpful in explaining the friendship between Midorikawa and Sweeney and their hypothesis.

It’s not a perfect book. The limitations of placing four tight biographies in one volume made each feel incomplete and a tad unsatisfying. The Jane Austin chapters were crammed with relatives and family intrigue. Austin’s literary friend, her niece’s governess, was an unpublished playwright. While the book makes a cogent argument as to the importance of their friendship to Austin’s novels, in this one section, I struggled to stay interested.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Charlotte Bronte. But this book revealed information I hadn't known previously; for example, it successfully debunked the idea of a literary friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell, instead focusing on her lesser known friendship with Mary Taylor, a free-thinking writer she met at school.

The connection between Eliot and Beecher-Stowe was revelatory. The Eliot chapters were my favorite of the book because of their vivid descriptions. George Eliot lived with George Henry Lewes who was separated from his wife. When his adult son, Thornie, returned from Africa with tuberculosis of the spine, George Eliot was his primary care giver. This book portrays her sacrifice and love better than any other I’ve encountered. The imperfect way Stowe is a friend to Eliot and the flawed response Eliot has to Stowe, are so poignantly human.

I entered the Woolf section expecting to hear about her romantic entanglement with Vita Sackville-West. However, that was not the focus here. Instead, it focused on her friendship with Katherine Mansfield, a fellow writer who also had (for a time) a literary friendship with D H Lawrence. The friendship between Woolf and Mansfield is depicted as both platonic and contentious. Both are assumptions made by Midorikawa and Sweeney, even though it seems likely that Mansfield had a sexual interest in female partners. Both Woolf and Mansfield were harsh, vocal critics of each other. I am not certain we fully know the complexity of their friendship. But The Secret Sisterhood proves that each deeply valued it.

Whatever the truth is for these friendships, the importance of an exchange of literary ideas and criticism between writers comes through. Midorikawa and Sweeney focused solely on female-to-female friendships. Yet let’s not discount female-to-male friendships. James Baldwin was friends with Toni Morrison. Henry James was friends with Edith Wharton. Writers benefit from friendships with fellow writers whom they respect and who are capable and unafraid to voice their opinions.

I am a part of a bi-monthly writing group, my own sisterhood. The friendships I have forged over the past two years are among the most meaningful of my lifetime. One is vulnerable when reading their written words aloud in an early stage of development. That shared vulnerability has helped our group understand each other and to empathize with each other’s very personal aches. Critical listening and commentary isn’t only important to improving our written words. We “hear” each other on a deeper level. Each of us has felt a twinge of discomfort from a comment. That’s inevitable. For myself, upon re-examination, I always see the critic’s point. Without their critique, I would not have corrected the flaw. I am grateful for their insights, inspiration, wisdom, perspective, and support. I suspect my precursors felt the same about their literary cohorts.

I enjoyed The Secret Sisterhood immensely. It has lessons for all friendships, not just literary ones: forgiveness, patience, self-reflection, tolerance. A year from now, I may not recall its many esoteric and absorbing details, but I felt pride in the sisterhood, to know these women who came before me struggled to control their rivalries, to succeed, to know what to say, and how forcefully. It’s an important book for any writer.