The Book of Women's Friendship

by Rachel Cooke (Editor)

Friendship has never been more highly debated, and loneliness more prevalent. Yet women’s friendships have repeatedly been neglected or minimized in storytelling, fallen by the wayside of male relationships. In the first major anthology dedicated to women’s friendship―and the first serious anthology about friendship published in more than three decades―editor Rachel Cooke looks to art to find the words to capture women’s platonic love. Compiling selections from novels, poems, diaries, letters, comics, and graphic novels about women’s friendship, she places work from a diverse array of artists in conversation across time and place.

With excerpts from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters, and from Zadie Smith to Meg Wolitzer, The Book of Women’s Friendship celebrates and investigates friendship between women, from first encounters to final farewells, from falling out to making up again. This book takes the shape of a human life, beginning with early efforts at friend-making and -breaking in childhood to chance collisions in adulthood. It contemplates (though not for too long) the flip side of friendship, which is not enmity, but loneliness; celebrates solidarity in all its guises; and ends with loss, the moment of goodbye.

Hardcover, 400 pages