A review by rosienreads
A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Bronte, Eliot and Woolf by Emma Claire Sweeney, Emily Midorikawa

3.0

A Secret Sisterhood is a book about female friendships, specifically in the context of four famous female writers – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. It explores each of the writers’ careers in the context of their friendship with another female writer (published or otherwise) of the time. While it was an interesting book to read, particularly with finding out about parts of the authors’ lives I had not previously been aware of, I found that the book struggled in making its case properly. Very little of the evidence to back up their descriptions of the friendships were included in the text, which made it very difficult to not see some of the points made as either guesswork or wishful thinking. This was particularly true of the older writers. If a few more diary entry segments or letter extracts had made their way into the pages of the book, it would have been a stronger text and have made more of an impact on me. That being said, I did enjoy the focus the book had on the female friendships, which is not something we often see in either non-fiction or fiction.