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'In digging up the forgotten friendships chronicled in A Secret Sisterhood, Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney have done much service to literary history.'
Margaret Atwood
'A Secret Sisterhood will help make women's literary friendships of the past relevant to the present.'
Michèle Roberts
'A Secret Sisterhood offers a clever new perspective on established literary figures.'
Tracy Chevalier
In their first book together, Midorikawa and Sweeney resurrect four literary collaborations, which were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring; but always, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows.
Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, and new documents uncovered during the authors' research, the creative connections explored here reveal: Jane Austen's bond with a family servant, the amateur playwright Anne Sharp; how Charlotte Brontë was inspired by the daring feminist Mary Taylor; the transatlantic relationship between George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the underlying erotic charge that lit the friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield - a pair too often dismissed as bitter foes.
A Secret Sisterhood uncovers the hidden literary friendships of the world's most respected female authors.
About the author
Emily Midorikawa lectures at City University and at New York University’s London campus. She has taught at the University of Cambridge and the Open University, as well as writing for the
Daily Telegraph, the
Independent on Sunday,
The Times,
Aesthetica and
Mslexia. Her memoir
‘The Memory Album’ appeared in
Tangled Roots, an Arts Council-sponsored collection that celebrates the stories of mixed-race families. Emily is the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2015, and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition. She was a runner-up in the SI Leeds Literary Prize, judged by Margaret Busby, and the Yeovil Literary Prize, judged by Tracy Chevalier.
Emma Claire Sweeney has lectured at City University, New York University in London, the Open University and the University of Cambridge. Her work has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and has been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri and Fish. She writes for newspapers and magazines such as the
Guardian, the
Independent on Sunday,
The Times, and
Mslexia. Her debut novel
Owl Song at Dawn was published by Legend Press in July 2016 to great acclaim.
Summary
‘In digging up the forgotten friendships chronicled in A Secret Sisterhood, Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney have done much service to literary history.’
Margaret Atwood
‘A Secret Sisterhood will help make women’s literary friendships of the past relevant to the present.’
Michèle Roberts
‘A Secret Sisterhood offers a clever new perspective on established literary figures.’
Tracy Chevalier
In their first book together, Midorikawa and Sweeney resurrect four literary collaborations, which were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring; but always, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows.
Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, and new documents uncovered during the authors’ research, the creative connections explored here reveal: Jane Austen’s bond with a family servant, the amateur playwright Anne Sharp; how Charlotte Brontë was inspired by the daring feminist Mary Taylor; the transatlantic relationship between George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the underlying erotic charge that lit the friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield – a pair too often dismissed as bitter foes.
A Secret Sisterhood uncovers the hidden literary friendships of the world’s most respected female authors.
