The Virago Book of Friendship is an anthology of writings centred on friendships between women. The lack of gender specificity in the title takes us to the nub of the problem: friendships between women exist in life but not in literature, at least not in literature from before 1940, when Vera Brittain paid tribute to Winifred Holtby in Testament of Friendship. There are sisters galore in 18th- and 19th-century novels, but not the kind of ‘bosom friend’ that Anne Shirley longs for in Anne of Green Gables, or the support groups described in Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary. 

What about Anna Howe and Clarissa, you cry, or Helen Burns and Jane Eyre, or Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice? The friendship in Clarissa (1748) between Samuel Richardson’s tragic heroine and Anna, her great confidante, is derided as much as it is celebrated. While Colonel Morden believes their relationship an exception to the rule that friendship is ‘too fervent a flame for female minds to manage’, Robert Lovelace, who is pursuing Clarissa, considers their tittle-tattle ‘nothing but chaff and stubble’. Where women are concerned, Lovelace argues, friendship is ‘a mere word … a cork-bottomed shuttlecock’. ‘When a man comes in between the pretended inseparables,’ friendship ‘is given up’. The truth of this theory is never tested because, after Lovelace rapes her, Clarissa dies. Helen Burns also dies, while Charlotte Lucas marries Mr Collins. If it’s hard to imagine Elizabeth’s friendship with Charlotte surviving her marriage, it’s not because the relationship is a cork--bottomed shuttlecock but because she loathes Charlotte’s husband.

The last anthology of this kind, Rachel Cooke writes in her chatty introduction, was The Oxford Book of Friendship (1991), edited by D J Enright and David Rawlinson, in which the briefest of chapters is reserved for friendships between women (and with no mention of Katherine Mansfield). While examples of