Category: Our books

Dear Something Rhymed readers … after a very long time

Published on by Emily Midorikawa2 Comments

We hope you are well, and that you might be interested in the news that one of us has a new book out. Emily’s debut novel, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is set in the Japanese city of Osaka in the early 2000s. It’s about the complicated friendship between two young women – a schoolteacher and a nightclub hostess – and what happens when one of them suddenly disappears.

Unlike A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, which we coauthored, only Emily’s name appears as the author on the cover this time. But Emma is not entirely absent from the text. Emily included a tribute to her in the Acknowledgements pages and the novel is also dedicated to her.

As Emily narrates in a post on her personal website, A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing’s path to publication has been long, convoluted and strange. Readers with long memories might recall from earlier posts like this one that her friendship with Emma began when the two were both young English language teachers working in Japan in roughly the same period as which the novel is set.

The early 2000s is also, incidentally, the period in which Emily began writing A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing. This means that the novel’s journey from first rough scribblings to bookshop shelves took over twenty years! And Emma has, of course, been at her side all the way, giving feedback on multiple drafts and offering writerly advice and encouragement.

Having begun the book when she was a young woman in her twenties, Emily worked hard on it for many years. It was eventually taken on by a literary agent who submitted it to countless publishers, but, although it got tantalising close on several occasions (and also won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for unpublished female writers in 2015), it never quite made it into print.

Eventually, Emily decided to put A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing aside to concentrate on other projects, such as the literary friendship blog, Something Rhymed, which she ran with Emma, their 2017 book A Secret Sisterhood and her 2021 solo-authored group biography Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice.

In 2024, however, Emily received an email from her literary agent letting her know that an editor who’d read the novel’s manuscript some years before, at a time when circumstances prevented her from acquiring it, was interested in taking another look. This was followed, a few weeks later, with an offer from Manilla Press to publish the book, plus the prospect of many more months thoroughly revising those pages to get them ready for the novel’s release last week.

The questions Emma (left) asked at the book launch were informed not only by her reading of the book, but also our many years of friendship.

This was, of course, immensely exciting for Emily and, as you’d expect, Emma was one of the first people with whom she shared the astonishing news. But the idea of returning to a manuscript that had been abandoned for the best part of a decade was also daunting, and she was glad to have Emma to turn to for guidance and support, just as they had done for each other on so many past occasions.

When Emily’s publisher asked her to suggest someone to chair the discussion at her London book launch, held at the fantastic independent Burley Fisher Books, there really was only one possible choice in her mind and she was thrilled when Emma said yes.

Although we’ve shared a stage on many past occasions, particularly events related to Something Rhymed and A Secret Sisterhood, we have had only limited practice at interviewing each other, so in some ways this was an unusual experience. On the other hand, since we know each other so well, there was something about sitting there before the audience in that packed bookshop that evening that felt incredibly familiar. You could say that it felt quite simply like two old friends getting together for a chat, which really we suppose it was.

While neither of us has turned our back on writing nonfiction, we have, in fact, both been working on fiction more recently. Emma is writing a novel, Magpies, about a biographer whose life spins out of control in the wake of the publication of her latest book, whose subject is Virginia’s Woolf’s half-sister, Laura Stephen, who died in obscurity in a mental asylum.

A Tiny Speck of Black and then Nothing is published by Manilla Press and is available as a hardback, ebook and audiobook. In the UK, copies are available from Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Bookshop.Org, Amazon or your favourite independent bookshop.

The US e-book, published by Open Road on 4 August, is available for pre-ordering from Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.Org, Amazon and independent bookstores. The US paperback will be released in November and will be available for pre-ordering soon. (The audiobook is already available in the US and Canada, as it is elsewhere.)

If you would like to keep up with Emily, through monthly memoir-based essays relating to her novel, you can sign up for her newsletter here.

And for dispatches from Emma’s new life at The Little Goat Barn writing retreat in North Wales with Jonathan Ruppin, her ex-London literary agent husband, subscribe for free to The 400-year-old Library Substack.

Reflections on a Writing Friendship: A post to mark the publication of Emily’s new book

Published on by Emily Midorikawa7 Comments

In October 2020 we posted the last of our regular pieces for Something Rhymed, close to seven years since we began our blog about female literary friendship. Although it was a difficult decision for us to stop, the demands of new writing projects that we were pursuing individually, not to mention many changes in our personal circumstances, meant that we both agreed that this particular chapter in our creative lives had to come to a close.

Since that last post, Emma has been hard at work on her novel-in-progress, and I’ve been privileged to read several draft sections already. I have been enjoying watching the story and historical world she’s creating taking shape, and I very much look forward to the day when I’ll be able to hold the published version in my hands.

In my case, following on from A Secret Sisterhood – the book the two of us published in 2017, which focuses on the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontё, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf – I have spent the last months getting ready for the publication of another nonfiction book, which has now been released in Canada, the UK and the USA.

Out of the Shadows: Six Visionary Victorian Women in Search of a Public Voice, a group biography, draws on diaries, letters, rarely seen memoirs and texts to tell the stories of six enterprising women of the nineteenth century, whose apparent ability to contact the dead brought them fame, fortune and astonishing levels of social and political influence.

Although I wrote this book on my own this time, as I mention in its Acknowledgements section, Emma was with me through every step of the creative process. She was the first person who I told about my idea to write about the lives of female celebrity Spiritualists, and it was conversations with her that helped me to choose which women’s lives would be my focus.

In the end, I decided to write about six women who – as the book’s subtitle suggests – all used their Spiritualism as a way to make themselves heard on the public stage. The Fox sisters, from upstate New York, inspired some of the era’s best-known political activists and set off a transatlantic séance craze. London-born Emma Hardinge Britten, a renowned female orator, delivered controversial speeches to packed concert halls while apparently in the throes of a trance. Former childhood clairvoyant Victoria Woodhull, a Wall Street trailblazer, became America’s first female presidential candidate; Georgina Weldon, whose beliefs nearly saw her confined to an asylum, went on to establish herself as a successful campaigner against Britain’s archaic lunacy laws.

As I continued my research, using library and museum archives on either side of the Atlantic and visiting key locations associated with these women’s lives, I frequently discussed my developing ideas with Emma. Once I’d managed to get my chapters into a reasonable shape, Emma was there again with her usual forensic literary eye to offer critical feedback and encouragement. And, as ever, I have been so grateful for her insights during the later stages of the book’s production – when I was considering potential book cover designs and coming up with ideas for related publicity, for instance.

One of my fondest memories, however, is of sending Emma my final chapters for review in – though we didn’t know it yet – the last months before the UK would be plunged into a series of pandemic-related lockdowns, meaning that we would be largely unable to meet in person for a year-and-a-half. Having read my work, Emma invited me over to her house so that we could talk about her thoughts. Huddled together in her beautiful book-lined sitting room, working our way through these last pages I had written, I was reminded how fortunate it was that our paths had collided when we were young women – and that we have been walking the same route, as writer-friends, for almost two decades since.

Out of the Shadows has been reviewed in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, which praised its ‘tapestry of complex characters with conflicted motivations, woven together with the color of ghostly apparitions (and angry mobs); the New York Times, which said, ‘Midorikawa’s chosen Spiritualists are a colorful bunch, and her lively writing makes their careers fun to follow’; and Publishers Weekly, which said, ‘Women’s history buffs will be enthralled.’ It is available as a print, e or audio book.

Image: The Royal Society of Literature

A final note: the two of us will be taking part in the Royal Society of Literature’s Dalloway Day celebrations, in an online event in association with the British Library at 7.30pm (UK time) on Wednesday 16 June. We’ll be discussing the literary friendship of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf with Kirsty Gunn and Irenosen Okojie, and it would be wonderful if you could join us for this if you can. Tickets are available if you follow this link and scroll down to our event.

Sheer Good Fortune

Published on by emmaclairesweeney7 Comments

As regular readers of Something Rhymed may have guessed, Emily and I have been busy these past months working on other projects.

I’ve become Director of The Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio, which offers mentoring by authors and agents to writers of fiction, narrative non-fiction and YA.

Emily has been holed away in the rare books rooms of various libraries, researching a transatlantic group of Victorian clairvoyants for her new book Out of the Shadows, which will be published by Counterpoint Press.

And we’ve both made significant changes in our personal lives too…

When Emily and I launched Something Rhymed back in 2014, we published a post on Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison – writers whose friendship combined from its inception the personal and professional, the celebratory and consolatory.

These legends of American letters grew close when they shared a bill at the Hay Festival in Wales during a time when both women were concerned about their mothers who were ill back home. In the decades since then, these ‘sister friends’ moved seamlessly between the public and private aspects of their friendship, paying tribute to each other’s literary accomplishments at huge official gatherings but also talking about family over dishes of Angelou’s fried chicken or wedges of Morrison’s carrot cake.

It was just such a combination of intimacy and admiration, celebration and consolation that prompted Angelou to help put on an event to honour her fellow author during a period when she knew that Morrison needed to be shown love and comfort following the death of her son.

The event was poignantly titled Sheer Good Fortune after the dedication Morrison had made to her boys at the beginning of her novel Sula: ‘It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you’. And now, in the wake of Morrison’s recent death, such a sentiment feels particularly resonant.

Back at the Hay Festival in 2014, Morrison announced from the stage they’d once shared the sad news that Angelou had died. Emily and I, sitting in the audience side by side, promised each other to follow their example by not only continuing to offer each other solace during dark times but also to celebrate each other privately and publicly, professionally and personally.

Over the years, Emily and I have been there for each other during bereavements and breakups as well as periods of professional and financial uncertainty. This only heightens the pleasure we’ve taken in the sheer good fortune each of us has experienced of late.

I will never forget the excitement in Emily’s voice when she called to let me know that she was expecting a baby. And then, not long afterwards, when we were in a tiny French restaurant in Earl’s Court marking both her pregnancy and her birthday, she shared her news that she and her long-term partner Jack had got engaged on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.

A few months later, when I was delivering bourguignons, curries and Spanish stews to Emily’s flat in preparation for the weeks following the approaching birth, I told her about my partner Jonathan’s proposal to me and mine to him on a hillside overlooking a market town in Shropshire. Once I’d stocked up Emily’s freezer, we headed back to Earl’s Court, this time to one of our favourite coffee houses. There, we celebrated my engagement to Jonathan and Emily’s marriage to Jack and her pregnancy alongside a female friend we’ve  known since our days as young English teachers in rural Japan.

Wedding shoes – Emily & Jack getting married

The spot where Jonathan and Emma proposed to each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily and I had dedicated our co-written book A Secret Sisterhood to Jack and Jonathan – a strange choice, perhaps, for a book on female literary friendship, but it felt fitting to us since our partners had always appreciated the importance of our own writing friendship, and had supported it at every turn. In our Acknowledgements, we thanked Jack and Jonathan for ‘keeping us well fed during long stints in our studies, and, most of all, never failing to be there when we emerged’.

No sooner did Emily and I emerge, however, than we each went back into hibernation – separately this time. Although we are no longer editing at a shared desk, sustained by Jack’s late-night dashes to the local kebab house or breakfasts with Jonathan at the greasy spoon, the four of us have found new ways to offer each other personal sustenance and professional support.

Emily and I have gone back to reading each other’s drafts, for instance, with a freshness and curiosity that was impossible when we’d already pored over the research materials side by side and laboured together over chapter plans.

And, when Jonathan and I set up The Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio – a development scheme for writers of fiction and narrative non-fiction – Emily was one of the first people I asked to join our nationwide line-up of mentors. I know first-hand, of course, the quality of her feedback and the dedication she shows to other writers. Like me, Emily is originally from the north of England and we’ve both supported friends and family with access needs, so Emily shares our belief in making mentoring accessible across the country in person and via videocall, and she understands why we are committed to offering a free spot to someone of limited means. Like me, back when Emily was unpublished, she benefited from a period of mentoring by a more established author. Now that she is bringing out books on both sides of the Atlantic, she’s as keen as I am to offer other writers similar opportunities.

During a summer spent largely setting up The Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio and continuing to work on my new novel, my friendship with Emily has offered me the most joyful of excuses to escape from my writing shed. During my first meetings with baby Lola, I have enjoyed rocking her to sleep in the nursery, pushing her pram through the park and chatting with Emily about everything from marriage to mentoring, motherhood to manuscripts. And, over the years to come, I’ll look forward to helping Emily teach her daughter what creative women have always known – that together we are greater than the sum of our parts.

Emily and Lola

Emily will be on maternity leave for the rest of this year, but I will continue to run Something Rhymed after its summer hiatus.  

We are looking for female writing friendships to feature on the site from October onwards. Please do take a look at our submission guidelines and get in touch if you’d like to pitch an idea.

It would also be lovely to hear from any of you who might be interested in the following literary projects I’ll be involved in over the coming months:

You can apply for all the mentoring and editing packages offered by The Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio via its website, or direct any queries to studio@ruppinagency.com. The deadline for the selective scheme (including the free spot) is 5pm on Monday September 2nd but we accept ongoing applications for all other packages.  

Booking is now open for my one-day novel writing courses at the gorgeous Cambridge Writing Retreat. On Saturday October 19th, we’ll be asking what ‘Show Don’t Tell’ really means. And on Saturday November 23rd, Jonathan will join me in his role as literary agent to help writers work out what steps to take once the crucial first draft is complete.

And do save Saturday October 26th for the University of East Anglia’s Doris Lessing centenary celebration. I’m looking forward to sharing more stories about Lessing’s friendship with Muriel Spark during my conversation on stage with Rachel Cusk and Lara Feigel. This event also includes access to UEA’s Doris Lessing 100 exhibition, which contains archival material on display for the very first time.

 

 

New Chapters: From co-authors to creative companions

Published on by emmaclairesweeney5 Comments

On the day when our joint book comes out in paperback in North America, it is my great honour to announce that Emily’s new non-fiction book, Out of the Shadows, will be published by Counterpoint Press over there, most likely in summer 2020. And the North American audio rights have been acquired by Recorded Books, who also produced the audio version of A Secret Sisterhood.

In the midst of our celebrations, I reflect on our circular literary journey from a nervous first exchange of drafts to co-authoring and back again.

I first read Emily’s creative writing a decade and a half ago, when she was still in Japan (where we’d met as young English teachers) while I had returned to the UK and was living back with my parents in Birkenhead. The package of word-processed pages, which had wended their way from Emily’s shoebox apartment to my pink-walled childhood bedroom, lay unopened for days on end.

During my shifts front-of-house at a local cinema and in between protracted break-up conversations with my long-term boyfriend, my faraway friend’s unread work kept playing on my mind: what if I didn’t understand it, or couldn’t think of a response, or hated every word?

Part of me regretted our agreement to exchange writing samples. Although we’d been friends for two years, and had known about our shared dreams of publication for the past twelve months, I wondered whether our promise to read and give feedback on each other’s work had been too hasty. With my home, job and relationship all feeling temporary, I held onto writing and friends for stability. Both, I prayed, would remain in my life for the long haul. And yet, I dreaded receiving Emily’s feedback on my fledgling fiction. I wasn’t sure I had much to offer as a critic, either, and I was worried about the strain the discussion might place on us.

But as soon as I read Emily’s story – pen in hand and bolstered by pillows – I felt a sense of hope. The compelling narrative, enigmatic characters and captivating sensuality introduced me to a new side to my friend. I was brimming with ideas and comments and questions. For the first time in a while, I felt confident about the future: here was a friendship that could only be deepened by our daunting literary endeavours; here was someone I sensed would become my constant writing companion and confidante.

Neither of us could have predicted the extent to which we would walk alongside each other during our long, shared journeys to publication: postgraduate degrees in creative writing from the same programme; lecturing jobs at the same universities; thousands of draft pages covered in each other’s scrawl.

When we finally attended each other’s book launches or award ceremonies – having both by then accumulated stacks of rejection slips – the celebrations felt jointly earned. After all, we knew each other’s writing almost as well as our own, detecting behind each published page the ghostly presences of killed-off characters, discarded scenes and amputated lines.

The North American paperback of A Secret Sisterhood, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is out now.

Back when we first plucked up the courage to exchange our earliest drafts, we’d hardly dared dream of such intense collaboration, let alone the prospect of seeing our names published side-by-side. The first time we enjoyed this privilege was when we pitched a joint idea on female literary friendship to  The Times. And, of course, we would later experience the joy of seeing our names together on the cover of our co-authored book, A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Writing together has brought us countless chances to share a creative process that is usually characterized by solitude. Instead, we’ve ferried bulging files of notes between each other’s homes; pored over forgotten manuscripts in far-flung archives; eaten fry-ups together after editing through the night; travelled across the USA on the Secret Sisterhood book tour, knowing that the friend we sat beside on stage was ready to pitch in whenever we needed help.

Even the inevitable difficulties of co-authorship have ultimately enhanced our friendship and our writing lives. We learnt, for instance, that we can get over fiery sleep-deprived arguments, that our literary disagreements invariably challenge us to come up with new and more robust ideas.

Owl Song at Dawn (Legend Press) won the literary category of Nudge Book of the Year 2016

Our joint research for A Secret Sisterhood paved the way for each of our new books. I have become increasingly fascinated by another of Virginia Woolf’s female relationships – one that instilled in Woolf such fear and shame that she suppressed it from accounts of her life. Consigned to the footnotes of literary history, this woman will take centre stage in my novel based on her life.

Fiction writing marks a homecoming for me since my debut, Owl Song at Dawn, was a novel that explored Britain’s little-known history of learning disability through the lives of twin sisters born in Morecambe in 1933. Emily, however, will be deepening her practice as a writer of non-fiction.

During our Secret Sisterhood research trip to the New York Public Library, Emily transcribed a cache of letters from Harriet Beecher Stowe, the American author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to her British female friend George Eliot. Emily became fascinated by Stowe’s interest in Spiritualism – the belief that the living have the power to communicate with the dead.

Out of the Shadows will be published by Counterpoint Press, most likely in summer 2020.

Through this, Emily discovered a transatlantic community of Victorian women whose clairvoyant claims secured them unprecedented levels of power and celebrity.

Emily’s book proposal for Out of the Shadows introduced me to the mysterious world of seances, trance lecturers and former child mediums, who spoke up about female suffrage and draconian lunacy laws, delivered powerful political oration, advised Wall Street brokers, and even, in one case, stood as the first female presidential candidate of the United States.

I know that Emily has been spending hours on end in the library, and that her draft chapters are stacking up, but I have only caught glimpses so far of the stories they might contain. Soon, I hope, Emily will send them to me for feedback.

Fifteen years ago, when we first exchanged work, I felt almost paralyzed by the unknown territory contained in Emily’s word-processed pages. Now, I will pick up my pen straight away, curious to see where my friend’s research has taken her, impatient to read her words once more. On this journey back from co-authoring to writing separately, it is this renewed sense of mystery that I most relish – the opportunity to be taken somewhere entirely unexpected, led every step of the way by a trusted friend.

A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf is out in paperback in North America today.

A New Paperback… and a new direction for Something Rhymed

Published on by Emily Midorikawa4 Comments

We’re very excited to let you know that, here in the UK at least (as well as various other Commonwealth countries) the paperback of A Secret Sisterhood is out in shops today.

As regular Something Rhymed readers will know, it tells the stories of the literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. To celebrate, we’ve arranged a blog tour, which will take place over the next couple of weeks and feature reviews of our book. The first stop on the tour is A View from the Balcony. The full tour schedule is below:

 

Also look out for upcoming reviews on Lonesome Reader, Cornflower Books, the Literary Sofa, Northern Reader, Jess Writes and Crocus Connect Books.

If you or anyone you know would be interested in reviewing the paperback on their blog, please do get in touch via the ‘Contact Us’ page and we will arrange for a copy to be sent out by return of post. Of course, we are also hugely appreciative of any feedback on Amazon (regardless of where the book was purchased).

We hope you’ll enjoy following the tour, especially since we could never have written A Secret Sisterhood without the support and encouragement of all of you. When we began this blog in January 2014, we imagined that it would be a year-long web project. We never anticipated where it would take us. Writing for Something Rhymed has been a wonderful experience, and we have been delighted to forge so many new friendships of our own with readers all over the world.

It’s always been important to us that Something Rhymed remains an advert-free, not-for-profit blog. We run this site in our spare time and it has become increasingly tricky to find enough hours in the day to keep generating new content, in addition to writing our books, teaching, journalism and doing events.

Now that we are both embarking on new writing projects, we have begun to turn our minds to the future of Something Rhymed. And, as such, we’d love to hear from you.

Open call for submissions

Would you like to write for Something Rhymed? If so, please send a short pitch via our Contact Us page, letting us know who you are and what you would like to write about.

In the past, articles on Something Rhymed have included:

  • Posts that profile the friendship of a well-known or unjustly forgotten, usually historical, female literary pair – 500 to 800 words. (For examples of former profile posts, please click on the links on this page and scroll down to the earliest post listed under each link.)
  • Posts that deal more generally with the theme of female literary friendship – 500 to 800 words. (See this, this and this example but we’d also be open to all sorts of new approaches.)
  • ‘Guest posts’ that profile a writer’s own literary friendship – 500 to 650 words. (For examples of former guest posts, please click on the links on this page.)

Please note that if you would like to send us a pitch for a guest post, we ask that you do this as part of a pitch for two articles – one of which should not be about your own literary friendship.

We are open to other ideas too, as long as they fall within the general theme of female literary friendship.

Editorial / administrative volunteers

We’re also looking for people who might be interested in volunteering to help out with the editorial and administrative side of things. Over the years we’ve been running Something Rhymed, as well as writing blog posts ourselves we have solicited and edited guest posts from other writers, organised site logistics (such as timings of posts, image rights, design issues), publicised posts on social media, managed contact lists etc.

Doing these kinds of things has helped us to develop valuable skills while also building our profiles and expanding our literary contacts. We’d love now to give some of these opportunities to others who might find them similarly helpful. If you are interested in helping out with editorial and admin, please do get in touch with us via our Contact Us page.

We’ll look forward to hearing from anyone with ideas for submissions and / or interested in volunteering with editorial and admin.

We’re really hoping that in this way we can keep building the Something Rhymed community, and expand the site as a resource for anyone who values female literary friendship.

 

Travelling Together: Our Secret Sisterhood book tour of the USA

Published on by Emily Midorikawa6 Comments

Regular readers of Something Rhymed will perhaps recall that we’ve sometimes likened our friendship to that of Vera Brittain, author of Testament of Youth, and Winifred Holtby, who penned South Riding.

We find ourselves particularly drawn to this pair because, like us, they met when they were at the very start of their writing journeys and each soon committed to becoming the ‘travelling companion’ of the other.

When Holtby spoke of this, she meant it in a metaphorical sense. But, as young friends in the 1920s, the two also enjoyed more literal travels when they spent a summer holidaying together in Cornwall and another in France and Italy.

The Kiyomizu temple in Kyoto, which we visited together during our early twenties (Image by Martin Falbisoner – Wikipedia Creative Commons licence)

When we were first getting to know each other, while working as English language teachers in Japan, we did a lot of travelling. We look back on our joint-trips with great fondness – not just because they gave us the opportunity to explore new places together, but also because the conversations we had, walking the streets of ancient cities or the rough paths of mountainous regions, really cemented our fledgling friendship.

Although the years we spent working intensively on A Secret Sisterhood have been – all in all – a wonderful experience, we have sometimes lamented the fact that, during this period, it sometimes felt that work had taken over all other aspects of our relationship, and that important events in each of our lives had passed by without much opportunity for sharing them with our friend.

The two-and-a-half weeks we’ve just spent touring the USA together, to mark the American publication of our book, turned out to be just the chance to put all this right.

We began our tour in New York City, with an interview with Kory French for Book Talk on Breakthru Radio, which has recently gone live. This gave us the chance to reflect – as we would many times over – on the highs and lows of writing a book together, including the joys of joint discoveries, and the frustrations of late-night quarrels about turns of phrase and the points we each felt our book ought to be making. All of these, we’re relieved to be able to say, ultimately brought us closer.

Image by Ravi Sunnak

Our first event was at the NYU bookstore, with Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own.

Next up was a talk at Shakespeare & Co. with Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (writer of novels including Bittersweet and June). This event was organised by the Brontë Society’s American chapter and the Jane Austen Society of North America – NY Metropolitan Region.

Our sell-out event with Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (image by Shakespeare & Co)

We had known Kate and Miranda only through their books before, and so it was a real pleasure to meet them in person. But at our event at Book Passage in San Francisco, it was lovely to collaborate again with Mary Volmer (Reliance, Illinois), who had also chaired the conversation at our northern book launch in the UK, back in June.

At Vroman’s in Pasadena, another dear friend of ours Elizabeth L. Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton and The Tincture of Time) ran a discussion between us and another pair of author-friends Julia Fierro (Cutting Teeth and The Gypsy Moth Summer) and Caeli Wolfson Widger (Real Happy Family).

And finally, it was wonderful to be interviewed at UCLA by Professor Michelle Liu Carriger, an old friend from our Japan days.

With our book on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt shelves behind us

In between our events, we went to meetings together, saw an interview we’d given to Alexis Coe for Lenny Letter go live, and visited the headquarters of our American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in Boston and New York City.

We caught up with mutual friends living in the USA, and worked on book-related feature articles, including this one, recently published in The Millions, and this one just out in TIME – Motto. In the gaps between all these things, we enjoyed a bit of sightseeing, and, perhaps most of all, caught up on all that personal news we’d managed to miss, and just enjoyed each other’s company as friends.

 

 

Released today in the USA: A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf

Published on by emmaclairesweeney7 Comments

In London tonight we plan to celebrate together with a glass of bubbly and a home-cooked meal. We’ll be raising our glasses to the US edition of A Secret Sisterhood, which Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are publishing stateside today. And we’ll also be toasting all the readers of Something Rhymed who encouraged us to write a book on female literary friendship.

It won’t be long before we get to help this edition make its way into the world during our US book tour.

We’d love to meet some of you in person at the following engagements in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles:

Thursday 26 October, 6-7.30pm – Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney in conversation with Kate Bolick at NYU Bookstore, New York City

Saturday 28 October, 2-4pm – The Jane Austen Society of North America – NY Metropolitan Region and the Brontë Society American Chapter: Conversation with Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney (chaired by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore) at Shakespeare & Co, New York City

Wednesday 1 November, 6pm – A Celebration of Literary Sisterhood: Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney in conversation with Mary Volmer and Cheryl Crocker McKeon at Book Passage, San Francisco (event sponsored by the WNBA-SF, Saint Mary’s College MFA in Creative Writing)

Tuesday 7 November, 7pm – Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney present and sign A Secret Sisterhood, in conversation with Elizabeth L. Silver, and joined by Julia Fierro and Caeli Wolfson at Vroman’s Book Store, Pasadena

Wednesday 8 November, 6pm – Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney in conversation with Prof. Michelle Carriger at UCLA (event sponsored by UCLA’s English Department and Friends of English)

In the meantime, we have upcoming UK events at Chawton House Library, Bloomsbury Literature Festival and Wantage Literary Festival.

We long ago promised each other that we would try our best to enjoy the process of getting published, because we knew all too well that chances to celebrate can be few and far between. Today seems a good time to reflect on A Secret Sisterhood’s publicity highlights to date:

Reviews

Medley of vivid narratives – The Atlantic 

Midorikawa and Sweeney have committed an exceptional act of literary espionage. English literature owes them a great debt – The Financial Times 

Glorious insights into female rivalry and female solidarity and the delicate balancing act required to ensure one doesn’t override the other – The Herald

These forgotten friendships, from illicit and scandalous to radical and inspiring, are revelations – Kirkus 

Evocative and well-researched ode to female solidarity – Publishers Weekly

Best Holiday Reads 2017 – Observer 

The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2017 – Publishers Weekly

Articles, essays, excerpts and interviews

Daily Telegraph

BBC History Extra

I newspaper

Irish Independent

Irish Times

Red Magazine

Times Literary Supplement  

And there’ll be more soon in Kirkus, Lenny, LitHub, The Millions, The Paris Review, Smithsonian, and TIME.

Next week…

We’ll be back with another guest blog from another pair of modern-day female writer friends.

 

 

 

 

A Secret Sisterhood: in the media

Published on by Emily MidorikawaLeave a comment

With our book A Secret Sisterhood just out in the UK, it gives us such pleasure to look back on the past three years running Something Rhymed together.

By the time we launched our blog at the beginning of 2014, with this post on Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, we had been researching the subject of female literary friendship for some time already. But, over the months that followed, it was the enthusiasm of Something Rhymed readers that encouraged us to explore the subject of female literary friendship in far greater detail in a book.

A Secret Sisterhood features the stories of the literary friendships of Jane Austen and amateur-playwright-cum-family-governess Anne Sharp; Charlotte Brontё and early feminist author Mary Taylor; George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame; fellow Modernists Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Literary journalists and friends Arifa Akbar and Katy Guest interviewing Emma and Emily during a friendship-themed literary event at New York University London to mark the launch of A Secret Sisterhood. © Rachel Gilbertson

We thought you might be interested in the following articles and reviews, which give something of a taster of the book. We’re also hard at work on pieces for the I newspaper, and the TLS, among others, so do look out for those.

Daily Telegraph: Emily and Emma on How Jane Austen’s mystery woman was edited out of history

The Pool: ‘You don’t think you can find out anything new about Jane Austen…’ says Emma. Kate Leaver interviews us.

Yorkshire Post: Emily asks Why are so many female authors portrayed as eccentric, lonely spinsters?

Litro: Emily and Emma discuss The Lost Art of Letter Writing

Foyles: Jonathan Ruppin interviews us about Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood and how to write together and stay friends.

Writers & Artists: Emma and Emily talk about Literary Sisterhood

Women Writers, Women[’s] Books: Emma and Emily on The Art of Co-Authorship

Byte the Book: Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone reviews A Secret Sisterhood

Islington Gazette: Emily on A Secret Sisterhood: Uncovering the hidden friendships of great literary women

Sarah Emsley: Emily and Emma consider First Impressions: Jane Austen’s radical female friendship

The Writing Garnet: Emma and Emily talk about being Travellers on the Same Road

Annecdotal: Anne Goodwin reviews A Secret Sisterhood

Greenacre Writers: Emily and Emma In Conversation

 

Next week

We have an event coming up at Waterstones Crouch End in London. If you can make it, we’d love to see you. Tickets are £4 and can be purchased in advance here.

Details of our other forthcoming events are listed on our Events Calendar.

This month

We’ll be profiling another pair of female writer friends, suggested to us by one of our readers. If you have an idea for a pair of literary pals you’d like to see featured on Something Rhymed, do please let us know. You can do this by leaving a comment or visiting the Contact Us page.

 

A Secret Sisterhood – available for pre-order

Published on by emmaclairesweeney1 Comment

Even though writers are supported by a team of people at their publishing house, bringing a book into the world can sometimes feel a lonely business. There’s usually one person hunched over her desk, one name on the cover and one person travelling to interviews and events.

We feel so fortunate to be able to share the experience. During the most intense periods of editing A Secret Sisterhood, we stayed in each other’s homes for days on end, took walks together during our breaks, and cooked each other late-night bowls of pasta.

Now that our UK publication date is almost upon us, we’re working in the same room once more. This time our advance copies are stacked on the desk beside us, our names side by side on the cover – alongside Margaret Atwood’s, who generously wrote our foreword.

Now available for early purchase. Every pre-order raises the book’s profile with retailers.

In keeping with the theme of A Secret Sisterhood, during our years of research and writing, a great many individuals and organisations have extended the hand of friendship to us – not least the readers of this blog. Your confidence from early on that this subject deserved to be explored in greater depth inspired us to write this book.

We’re hoping to meet lots of you in person during the coming months at some of our events. We’ll be interviewed by Michèle Roberts and Sarah LeFanu at Waterstones Gower Street; talking with Kate Mosse at the British Library; and delivering the keynote speech at the 46th Annual George Eliot Lecture. Details of these and other events can be found here, and we’ll be adding to it regularly over the coming days and weeks.

Just to add:

The UK edition will be out on 1 June. The US edition, with a slightly different title (A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf) will be out on 17 October. We’ll say more about this nearer to the time, but both editions are available for pre-order now. The US edition is currently heavily discounted if you pre-order it here.

A Foreword by Margaret Atwood

Published on by emmaclairesweeney12 Comments

When our UK publishers, Aurum Press, asked us to find a major contemporary author to write the foreword to A Secret Sisterhood, Margaret Atwood immediately sprung to mind.

Some of you may remember that Margaret kindly shared a link to Something Rhymed on social media not long after we first launched. We were particularly touched by this gesture since we know that Margaret understands the importance of female literary friendship first-hand. She is a longstanding friend of Nobel Prize-winner and fellow Canadian, Alice Munro. You might well find more details about their relationship cropping up on our site in the new year…

But how could we possibly get our request to Margaret Atwood? Ironically, given that she is a keen user of new technologies, the answer lay in the lost art of letter writing – something we wrote about in the early days of this blog. We plucked up the courage to slip the handwritten note into Margaret’s hand after a public lecture, and then we waited…

secret-sisterhood-revised-cover

The new addition of Margaret Atwood’s name to the front cover tells you all you need to know for now about her response! Come June 1st, A Secret Sisterhood will be available from bookshops, our stories of female literary friendship coming after Margaret’s wise and funny reflections.

As you can imagine, we are delighted by this generous example of sisterhood, and are truly humbled to be sharing our cover with her.