A secret sisterhood The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot & Virginia Woolf

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Reams have been written about Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, but Midorikawa and Sweeney, both writers and academics, offer something new by examining each writer through the lens of friendships with other literary women. In Austen's case, it was Ann Sharpe, governess to her niece Fanny. Out of snobbery (Sharpe was a servant, after all), Austen's family all but expunged her from the record, but a deep dive into primary sources brings the friendship to light. Charlotte Brontë's lifelong friend Mary Taylor, a bolder spirit, was dismayed by what she saw as Brontë's constricted life and constantly pushed her to develop her creative gifts. Though they never met, George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe had an affinity based on their success as writers, and their epistolary friendship endured for more than 10 years. And though Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield are often portrayed as archenemies, in these pages they are shown as sharing a rare sense of communion that was complicated by competition, envy, illness, and repressed desires. Enthralling, illuminating, and a treat for fans of any of the writers who are covered.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Midorikawa and Sweeney (Owl Song at Dawn) explore some lesser-known literary friendships in this evocative and well-researched ode to female solidarity. They describe, for instance, how Jane Austen cultivated a friendship across class lines with her niece's governess, a woman named Anne Sharp with literary ambitions of her own. Charlotte Brontë and feminist author Mary Taylor met at boarding school and would ultimately overcome Taylor's first (and typically teenage) assessment of Brontë: "You are very ugly." George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe are shown through their letters to have been thoughtful and admiring supporters of each other's work. The section dealing with Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield is perhaps the most fascinating, as their friendship survived a great deal of mutual professional rivalry. Midorikawa and Sweeney also capture their subjects' settings in riveting detail, including Austen's Bath, Eliot's Regent's Park, and, in particular, the Garsington Manor flower gardens that Woolf and Mansfield both loved (and wrote competing stories about). The authors (who are themselves close friends) astutely explain that the friendships they depict became lost to cultural memory due to prevailing stereotypes of female authors as "solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses." It is a delight to learn about them here, as related by two talented authors. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Midorikawa (Owl Song at Dawn) and Sweeney, who corun the site SomethingRhymed.com, provide evidence of sustained, collaborative female friendships in the lives of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Extraordinary detective work has uncovered letters pointing to friendships between Austen and Anne Sharp, the governess/playwright who became a trusted friend to the novelist; Brontë and the radical feminist writer Mary Taylor; Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; and Woolf and the younger, more successful (at the time) Katherine Mansfield. In revealing these literary alliances, Midorikawa and Sweeney point out obstacles the novelists faced in trying to have their work recognized. At times, though, there is too much hypothesizing, especially in the case of Austen, since the details of her friendship with Anne are from Austen's ten-year-old niece's letters, sketchy evidence at best. Fascinating is the relationship of Mansfield and Woolf, which alternates from fierce rivalry to sexual attraction. VERDICT Readers interested in women writers and these authors in particular will find this work enlightening.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Rich and revealing portraits of four literary friendships.Because female authors are so often "mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses," Midorikawa and Sweeney (Owl Song at Dawn, 2016), both teachers at New York University in London, set out to uncover overlooked friendships. As Margaret Atwood puts it in the foreword, the authors successfully "retrace forgotten footsteps, and tap into emotional undercurrents." The close relationship between Jane Austen and Anne Sharp would be lost if it wasn't for Jane's niece, Fanny, whose writings included much information about her governess, Anne, who liked to pen theatricals. It turns out Jane had "deep affection" for Anne, her "most treasured confidante." Over the years, on and off, they "would find all sorts of ways to support each other's endeavors." Jane "treated Anne as her most trusted literary friend." Charlotte Bront and the pioneering feminist writer Mary Taylor were "good friends" despite quite differing personalities. Taylor was energetic and political while Charlotte was quiet and diffident. So when Mary wrote to her that Jane Eyre was "so perfect as a work of art," she also criticized it "for not having a greater political purpose." Despite disagreements and debates, they found a "space for themselves in the rapidly changing Victorian world." When George Eliot heaped great praise upon Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose bestselling fame was greater than Eliot's) for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Eliot received an unexpected letter from Stowe, which praised Eliot's works, and a friendship was born. Until, that is, Eliot shockingly learned of Stowe's published criticism of Byron for his incestuous relationship with his sister. It created a "frostiness" in their relationship, but it endured. Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield played a literary cat-and-mouse game with each other thanks to social differences and creative rivalry, but they remained friends. Despite occasional fictional flourishes, these forgotten friendships, from illicit and scandalous to radical and inspiring, are revelations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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PART ONE: Jane Austen & Anne Sharp 1 A Circle of Single Women In the most famous portrait of Jane Austen, she wears a gauzy dress and frilled cap, and sits demurely, gazing into the middle distance. In 1869, half a century after her death, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh commissioned this romanticized watercolor for his commemorative biography of Jane. The posthumous image took inspiration from a sketch drawn by her sister, Cassandra, in around 1810, when the novelist was in her mid-thirties. Her plain dress in this informal portrait is a far cry from the blue ribbons and diaphanous fabric of the painting used to create the frontispiece to A Memoir of Jane Austen. And the woman who stares from the original sketch conveys an uncompromising demeanor: a wry look in her eyes, her lips pursed and arms defiantly crossed. Like the later picture favored by her nephew, his sanitized book ​-- ​written with the assistance of siblings and one of his cousins ​-- ​scoured Jane's personality of all its grittier qualities. Conveniently ignoring their aunt's sharp tongue, they preferred to emphasize the neatness of her handwriting, the precision with which she dropped sealing wax onto her letters, the matchless nature of her needlework. Not only was this younger generation of Austens keen to appeal to high-minded Victorian ideals about propriety, they were also hampered by fading childhood recollections and a dearth of surviving documentation. Here, Cassandra must take some blame. In the 1840s, the elderly woman read each letter she'd received from her sister one last time. Whenever she came across anything particularly intimate or revealing, she paused, committed Jane's words to memory, and then fed the pages into the parlor's blazing fire. And so their most private confidences curled and flared and finally darkened to ash. Cassandra's eldest niece, Fanny, followed her aunt's example. She refused to collaborate with her cousins on the memoir and failed to preserve the letters that her father had received from Jane, as well as the vast majority of her own. This stealth begs the question: what secrets could Fanny and Cassandra have been at such pains to hide? In 1926, The Times (London) published two previously unseen letters, one from Jane and one from Cassandra, both addressed to a woman little known to fans and critics alike. Subtitled "Devoted Friends," the article introduced readers to "a shadowy figure" named Anne Sharp "for whom Jane Austen had no ordinary affection." That this woman had not appeared, even fleetingly, in the authorized version of Jane's life would have seemed strange to readers. From Jane's opening greeting of "my dearest Anne" to the warmth of the private jokes, family gossip, and heartfelt confidences that followed, it is clear that the recipient was a most treasured confidante. It might seem curious that the Austen family had been so keen to exclude a figure like Anne, on whose "tender" feelings Jane had come to depend and to whom she considered herself forever "attached." After all, by the Georgian era the British had moved so far from the classical ideal of friendship as an exclusively male domain that they especially prized such bonds between women. But Jane's letter, passed down by acquaintances of Anne through their female descendants, calls into question the Austen family's genteel portrayal of their famous aunt. For Anne was employed as the governess of Jane's niece, Fanny. Here was a relationship that belied the Memoir's image of a woman content solely with the company of her family and whose refined acquaintances "constituted the very class from which she took her imaginary characters." The uptight tone of Cassandra's letter to this same Anne Sharp hints at another reason for family disapproval. She accused Anne of "ardent feelings" and made a point of asserting her own greater claim on Jane. Cassandra's possessivenessand the younger generation's snobbery speak volumes about why this correspondent appears to us today only as a ghostly apparition, absent from official portraits of the novelist's life. But unpublished papers stowed deep in library archives still whisper of this woman and the bond she shared with Jane. To understand why Anne has been excluded from histories of her close friend, we must turn to the words of Jane's niece, Fanny. Keen as she was to get rid of her father's documents, Fanny kept her own crimson leather-bound pocket diaries, in which she made meticulous entries from the tender age of ten. Along with a cache of her correspondence, they have been passed down to us unscathed. These unpublished notebooks and letters, largely unmined by literary critics, shed light on what must have lain at the heart of the deep affection between Fanny's governess and aunt: like Jane, Anne was a writer. The child's entry for a Saturday early in 1804 transports us to a time before she knew anything of Anne's literary bent. On January 21, the governess was on her way to Godmersham Park ​-- ​the grand home of Jane's far wealthier brother ​-- ​to take up employment teaching Fanny. Anne's overnight journey took her through neat Kent villages and land scarred by freshly dug ditches that divided commons and heaths ​-- ​these regimented fields worlds away from the bustle of London, where she was born thirty-one years earlier. History has shown such scant interest in Anne that, until we discovered her name in an old baptismal ledger, even the year of her birth was unknown. And, as with most working women of her generation, no portrait nor any direct record of her words has ever been unearthed. Despite the wealth of information we have found, our reconstruction of Anne's life must largely rely on Austen family papers, most notably the account of Fanny, a privileged child born into the landed gentry, trained to regard household staff with kindly condescension. Fanny's letters show that she awaited the arrival of her new teacher with both eagerness and nerves ​-- ​mixed feelings that Anne surely shared. As the coach carrying the governess reached Godmersham Park, it would have halted at the boundary of the Austens' estate, its driver dismounting with his key before leading the horses onto the driveway, the towering iron gates closing behind them. As the carriage continued through the estate's deer park, a break in the trees offered Anne a glimpse of the red-bricked façade of the house, a place already so familiar to Jane: the hatching across its countless windows; the decorative masonry above the pillared entrance; the pleasing symmetry of its flanking pavilions, which had been so fashionably added just twenty-five years before. On approaching the coach-turning circle, it became clear that one of the new pavilions housed a huge reading room ​-- ​surely a cheering sight for a woman who penned theatricals. This library, where Jane enjoyed many an hour of solitude during her lengthy but occasional visits, dwarfed the size of the entrance hall and rivaled the ballroom, creating the impression, at least, that its owners were great lovers of literature. Beyond its checkered windows stood floor-to-ceiling bookshelves whose volumes would have offered something of a sanctuary to the intellectually curious. From the moment Anne's feet touched Godmersham's black-and-white marble flagstones, all eyes would have been upon her, the brood of children trying to get the measure of her, while the footmen and lady's maids sized her up for signs of haughtiness ​-- ​a characteristic considered common in governesses, who, though gentlewomen, were often paid little more than other household staff. The Times, whose later interest in Anne would stem only from her connection with Jane, would compare such a role to "a kind of shuttlecock between servants and mistresses, and the butt of both." Excerpted from A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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