A Secret Sisterhood

Midorikawa, EmilyEmily Midorikawa lectures at City University and at New York University in London. 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. Emily is the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2015.

Sweeney, Emma Claire
Emma Claire Sweeney has lectured at City University, New York University in London, the University of Cambridge and the Open University. 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.

'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.

A Secret Sisterhood uncovers the hidden literary friendships of the world's most respected female authors - Jane Austen and one of the family servants, playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor who shaped the work of Charlotte Brontë; the seemingly aloof George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, 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.