A review by balletbookworm
A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa

3.0

I really, really want to love this book more than I do. I like the concept of this book - reconstructing major literary friendships of major 19th century/early 20th English lady writers - but I feel the construction of brings it down. The authors try to walk a line between straight literary biography and historical fiction with imagined scenes of the women's lives interspersed with sentences drawn from letters and diaries and it didn't work for me. I would have preferred a much more straightforward literary biography, personally, with longer quotes from the primary source material rather. Also some notation/citations in the text would have been nice (I had a digital galley that appeared very close to the finished product without notation so perhaps the finished copies have that.)