My Classics Reading Challenge: A Secret Sisterhood & Literary Friendships

I won a finished copy of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf  by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney from The Holiday Cheer Contest sponsored by Bookreporter.com.

I love the book's focus on women writers supporting each other in their craft. The 'big names' in the subtitle are quite familiar, but other than Harriet Beecher Stowe and perhaps Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Gaskell, not all their 'literary' friends are well known.

Jane Austen was friends with Anne Sharp, an aspiring playwright reduced to being a governess, hired by Jane's brother Edward. Charlotte Bronte's school friend Mary Taylor encouraged her to study on the continent, altering her life (for better or worse). In her later life she was friended by Elizabeth Gaskell, who wroter her first biography. George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe corresponded over many years, although their relationship had its ups and downs. As did the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.

At university I was privileged to be in an amazing honors course on Jane Austen in which we read everything she wrote, including her juvinilia and letters. A few years back I read Charlotte Bronte and Her Family by Rebbecca Fraser and read most of the works by the Bronte sisters. (Including some of the poetry.) I have read Gaskell's Mary Barton and North and South,  George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Virginia Woolf's novels To The Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway and also A Room of Her Own. Back in my teenage years I read Harriet Beecher Stowes's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

A Secret Sisterhood made me realize I needed to fill in the 'gaps' especially concerning Eliot. Last year one of my book clubs read Stowe and I sadly could not fit it into my reading. And since I have wanted to read more of the classics this seemed like a great idea.

So, my 2018 reading challenge is to read A Secret Sisterhood along with novels by the authors discussed.

I ran over to Barnes and Noble and (with my membership card) purchased their $4 paperback editions. I can make notes in them without feeling bad. I opted for Eliot's Daniel Deronda over Middlemarch just because it looked a tad thinner. I picked up Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Woolf's Night and Day. I ordered Mansfield's Selected Stories. I downloaded Mary Taylor's The First Duty of Women from the Internet. I will reread Austen's Sense and Sensibility only because I have reread it least of all her works. (And it is pretty short.)

I don't have a schedule in mind. How fast I get through this project will depend on how many galley books I find I 'need' to read!

I still need to make the Bronte sisters quilt I have in my head. All the fabrics are waiting for me to get started.

A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf

Writers Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney were teaching in Japan when they met. They immediately connected and soon were regularly meeting and critiquing each other's writing.

As they collaborated on writing A Secret Sisterhood, they found happiness in spite of the stress. Their unfounded feared was that their 'bond between equals' would be threatened if one achieved success before the other.

When Margaret Atwood offered to write the forward for the book, it was proof that women writers do forge friendships of encouragement and support, in spite of historic stereotypes.

Jane Austen was mythologized into a happy spinster who hid her writing and relied only on her sister for support. Suppressed was her friendship with her rich brother's impoverished governess Anne Sharp, an amateur playwright.

Charlotte Bronte's friendship with boarding school friend Mary Taylor had its ups and downs, but it was Taylor who inspired Charlotte to travel abroad to continue her education. The intrepid Taylor became a feminist writer.

George Eliot, living 'in sin' with a married man, corresponded with clergyman's daughter and literary sensation Harriet Beecher Stowe. Over years, their closeness was stressed by life events, yet their regard for each other as artists prevailed.

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield are remembered as rivals, their mutual regard and friendship overshadowed.

A Secret Sisterhood was an interesting book about the "rare sense of communion" between literary friends. One does not need to be well informed about the writers discussed for enough biographical information is included to understand the friendships in context of the authors' personal and professional lives.

I enjoyed the book and learned something about writers I am quite familiar with and a great deal about those I knew little.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 9780544883734
Hard cover $27.00