The intensity of female friendship explored

‘From the days of Homer on,’ Vera Brittain wrote, ‘the friendships of men have enjoyed glory and acclamation, but the friendships of women, in spite of Ruth and Naomi, have usually been not merely unsung, but mocked, belittled and falsely interpreted.’ Rachel Cooke’s anthology – inspired in part by her own ardent friendship with the late Carmen Callil – seeks to redress that.

It was, as Cooke reports in her introduction, more of a challenge than she’d anticipated. Every other popular novel these days may be about female friendship (‘The result,’ Cooke semi-grumbles, ‘both of feminism and, I think, of capitalism’), but before Jane Austen, ‘fully realised and articulated friendships between women in literature’ were as rare as full stops in Henry James. The important relationship for women in fiction was marriage. 1991’s Oxford Book of Friendship – edited by two men – relegated friendship between women to a single brief chapter, and only 49 of its more than 300 authors were female.

‘Do women really have more friends than men, and are their relationships with them more intense?’

Cooke bravely risks the charge of what’s sometimes called gender essentialism in saying that female friendships – which is what this book, as its publisher might indicate, is interested in – are different from the male sort: more complex, more confiding, more agonised. ‘Do women really have more friends than men, and are their relationships with them more intense? It seems that the answer to both questions is yes.’ Blokes talk about ‘music, football, books’. Women talk about… other stuff too, apparently. Chaps can find out what that other stuff is by reading this book.

The result of Cooke’s considerable labours in the archive is a spry and very dip-in-and-outable anthology of writing about female friendship in an exhilaratingly wide array of forms from high culture and low.