Two female writers and best friends bring to light the literary friendships of four iconic female authors.

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 Brontë; 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.

With a foreword by Margaret Atwood

“A thought-provoking meditation on literary friendship as well as engagingly intimate glimpses of four of the world’s finest writers. ”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A medley of vivid narratives. ” —The Atlantic

“Midorikawa and Sweeney have committed an exceptional act of literary espionage. English literature owes them a great debt. ” —Financial Times

“A vital and necessary contribution to women's history, literary history, and the literature of friendship. ”—Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own