Introduction: In search of a secret sisterhood -- Jane Austen & Anne Sharp. A circle of single women ; Rebellion behind closed doors ; Closing ranks -- Charlotte Brontë & Mary Taylor. Three's a crowd ; Two adventurous spirits ; One great myth -- George Eliot & Harriet Beecher Stowe. The stuff of legend ; The specter of scandal ; An act of betrayal -- Katherine Mansfield & Virginia Woolf. Friends or foes? ; Cat-and-mouse ; Life and death -- Epilogue: A web of literary connections

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, but the world's most celebrated female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their investigations into a wealth of surprising collaborations, such as the friendships between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe or Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these stories of female friendships and literary collaborations. -- Adapted from book jacket

"Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, from Byron and Shelley to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's most celebrated female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their investigations into a wealth of surprising collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, amateur 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 the ebullient 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. Drawing on letters and diaries, some of which have never been published before, A Secret Sisterhood resurrects these stories of female friendships and literary collaborations. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always--until now--tantalizingly consigned to the shadows."--Jacket flap