Jane Austen’s hidden friendship
Secret sisterhood
Two hundred years ago this month, an ailing Jane Austen gathered the energy to pen the last letter she would ever send from her cottage in rural Kent. She professed her “tender” feelings for the recipient, her dear friend and fellow writer Anne Sharp, proclaiming herself forever “attached”. But the extraordinary woman who Austen singled out for this prolonged and affectionate farewell of May 1817 is little known today.
Historian Lucy Worsley suggested this week that although Austen almost certainly never slept with a man, she may instead have slept with a woman. We know not if her relations with Sharp were anything more than platonic, but either way, the obscurity of the latter is just as Austen’s relatives would have wished it. While the great novelist considered her correspondent a most treasured confidante, Austen’s family took a very different view of Anne. For this woman was a member of the servant class. Indeed, she’d worked for the Austens – as a governess to Jane’s niece.
Such a friendship flouted the social norms of the time. By keeping it out of official versions of Austen’s life, the family could create a false image of the famous author as a conservative maiden aunt, devoted above all else to kith and kin. As a result, the close bond she shared with Anne, who wrote plays in between teaching lessons, has become one of literature’s most enduring secrets.
To this day, we rarely hear about Anne’s valuable critiques of Austen’s novels Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma, nor of Austen’s support for Anne’s own plays. Austen even acted a role in one of these household theatricals – walking a mile in her friend’s shoes by playing the part of a teacher.
This kind of whitewashing is all too common. While male literary friendships have become the stuff of legend, mystery too often shrouds the relations that history’s most celebrated female authors sought with other creative, intelligent women. We often hear of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth tramping the Lakeland Fells; or the tangled sexual escapades of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley; or Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald surviving riotous drinking sprees. Unlike these famed male duos, our most respected female authors tend to be mythologised as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses.
Worsley’s view rather challenges the perception of Austen in the popular imagination as a genteel spinster who modestly covered her manuscript with blotting paper when anyone entered the room. But Austen was not the only female writer to be cast – or miscast – as a solitary figure.
Charlotte Brontë is perceived as one of three long-suffering sisters, scribbling away in a draughty parsonage on the edge of the windswept moors. The George Eliot of popular imagination is an aloof intellectual, shunned by more conventional Victorian ladies. And Virginia Woolf haunts the collective memory as a depressive, loading her pockets with stones before stepping into the River Ouse.
Our own experiences as female writers led us to question these accounts of extreme seclusion. The fruits of this questioning resulted in our new book, A Secret Sisterhood, which details some of the literary friendships that have been overlooked over the years.
We met in our early twenties, straight out of university, so shy about our literary ambitions that it took us almost a year to even share them with each other. But having ‘‘come out’’ as aspiring authors, over the years that followed we trod a joint path. Together we laboured over drafts of novels and learnt about the vagaries of the publishing industry – sharing struggles and moments of celebration. We critiqued each other’s works-inprogress, passed on news of literary competitions and publishing opportunities, offered a sympathetic ear as the rejection slips stacked up.
The truth is, becoming a published writer has always been a struggle. Jane Austen didn’t see her debut book published until 15 years after she penned the initial draft. Charlotte Brontë’s first novel was turned down, and lay in a bottom drawer until after her death. Knowing how much harder it would have been for each of us to keep at it without the other for support, we began to wonder whether our favourite female authors of the past had also enjoyed these kinds of friendships.
Our research led us to bundles of ageing letters, neglected diary entries, personal mementos stored in locked library archives – even scribbled notes that had lain undiscovered for 200 years, tucked inside the back of old journals. Through these documents we uncovered a treasure trove of hidden alliances.
The friendships detailed in A Secret Sisterhood shed new light on the lives of the most celebrated female authors. Charlotte Brontë enjoyed a lively friendship with the pioneering feminist writer Mary Taylor, whom she met as an adolescent at boarding school in 1831. Mary even makes an appearance in Charlotte’s novel Shirley, reimagined as the forwardthinking character of Rose Yorke.
The supposedly reserved George Eliot, meanwhile, formed an intimate attachment to the ebullient American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. These two were ideally placed to offer each other support, since they were in the unique position of being the most famous female authors on either side of the Atlantic. They opened themselves up to each other in a deeply personal sequence of letters
The extraordinary woman Austen wrote a last letter to is unknown today
discussing their work, their emotional states and the scandals that befell them. Each woman greatly admired the other’s literary talents, Eliot’s final novel Daniel Deronda bearing the influence of Harriet’s magnum opus Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
The relationship between Virginia Woolf and fellow modernist author Katherine Mansfield has gone down in history – but for all the wrong reasons. While they regarded themselves as competitive friends, they are too often remembered solely as bitter foes. In fact, the two enjoyed a genuine closeness: exchanging thoughtful gifts, travelling the length and breadth of London for weekly rendezvous, and on occasion expressing great affection for each other. They could at times be hurtful, too, but even their harsh criticisms could lead to creative breakthroughs.
Of all the examples of sisterliness we encountered through our joint research, the most unexpected came towards the end of writing A Secret Sisterhood. An author we’ve long admired, Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, who has enjoyed a four-decade long friendship with Nobel laureate Alice Munro, took us by surprise when she agreed to write its foreword. Here, Atwood argues that popular ideals of female friendship still rarely allow for moments of disagreement or rivalry, whereas it is considered only natural that men should compete.
This goes some way to explaining why the important friendships of female writers have failed to make it into literary lore.