My oldest friend has the same name as me: Rachel. But I call her Kitty, a variation on her surname. We have been close for more than 40 years. She and I will, I believe, know each other now until one of us finds ourself at the other’s funeral, where she will, perhaps, be required to tell funny stories to a crowd of unfamiliar people. Kitty, if you’re reading this, please don’t bring up that school trip to Normandy during which I famously disgraced myself.
We were 14 when we met at our Sheffield comprehensive; I wonder now that we found each other, because the school was unimaginably vast. But then I remember that it was the 1980s. Our teachers were often on strike: lessons began with a long wait for substitute staff to turn up, and in those minutes the gossip, like the bad behaviour, was frantic, everyone squeezing in as much as they could before the door opened and some slightly desperate figure tried to bring us to attention. Stuck in the same stream for maths, we spoke in those snatched moments about makeup and music – and, of course, about boys: about who we liked, and who we thought liked us, and which of these creatures we might nonchalantly pass in the corridor when the bell rang, or stand next to in the lunch queue.
And somehow, we never ran out of things to say: when the day was done we would go home and promptly ring each other. Telephones were – you’ll have heard this before – in the hall in those days. There was no privacy. Your brother would make annoying noises to distract you. Your mum would walk past, clicking her tongue in irritation, a finger tapping the face of her wristwatch. But we were not to be put off. The daily unpicking was as vital as air. We could wring drama from anything, though very often no squeezing was required. A certain Miss X appeared to be dating both a physics teacher and the hairy bloke who taught geography. A boy in history kept falling asleep, the result of his addiction to glue. Most sensationally of all, there were the sex lives of those girls who were so much more daring and sought after than us. Their daily soap operas, loudly and melodramatically performed, began with that staple of Just Seventeen’s problem page, the love bite (if a girl wore a polo neck, she was semaphoring a bruise). They ended, when we were not quite 16, with one girl falling pregnant. This wasn’t what we wanted for ourselves, and as she paraded her bump we must have resembled a pair of tricoteuses at the guillotine.
Friendship is lots of things, but when you’re young it’s a way of making sense of the adult world (for me, this was what it had in common with reading novels). My conversations with Kitty, rapt and ceaseless, helped me to discern character; to make up my mind about people; to learn about such things as trust and reliability. She and I were like-minded when it came to our friends and acquaintances: we saw them in a similar way, which is interesting to me now because we were not similar at all. While she was mostly sensible, I was inclined to rash behaviour. As we got older, I was always in love, or pining, or broken-hearted – and she would listen, and laugh at the way I embellished things, and hazard caution (because boys were complete idiots).
We went to college in the same city, so we still saw each other fairly often. And in the long holidays we sank straight back into the old routines, as springy as moss: weeknights were for the pub and TV soaps, Saturdays were for dancing. After we graduated, she returned to Sheffield to teach and I went to London to become a journalist, at which point the threads that bound us should have frayed – we were moving, rapidly, in different directions. Yet this never really happened. If we began to meet less often, ours was – and is – a bond that could survive long silences. We resume where last we left off. There are friends Kitty sees a lot more than me these days, and vice versa. But I maintain that I still know her as well as, and probably better than, anyone – and she me. This may be a delusion, of course. But if it is, I don’t care. This is my psychic ballast. Think of your friends. Who among them could you call in the middle of the night, and know they would listen and try to help, and not be angry with you for having woken them up? She is that person, for me.
Four decades. There have been weddings and funerals. Looking back, though, one memory still stands out. In my 30s, a man left me suddenly; we had just bought a house together, and this came as a terrible shock. The first person I rang was Kitty, and as soon as she possibly could, she came to London to see me. Full of gratitude, I remember that I went to St Pancras station to meet her. I also remember that of the two of us, she was the more tearful. “Oh, my poor friend,” she said, putting her arms around me. We stood like that for a while, quite oblivious to the swirling crowd, and I began to feel better then and there: a leaking boat that had managed somehow to come into harbour.
In October 2022, another friend of mine, the publisher Carmen Callil, died at the age of 84, after a short illness. I was sad, because I loved her and she made life, whenever we were together, such amazing fun. But in the run-up to her funeral I suffered for another reason too. As plans for a send-off were made, I found myself on the outside of things, and this brought me to realise that I had been less close to her than I’d imagined – or, to be more accurate, that she had many, many friends who were just as dear to her as I was, and some a great deal more dear. About this, I was upset and confused, as well as embarrassed and a bit jealous. In life, Carmen had, everyone agreed, a genius for friendship; those who knew her felt special, singled out; we basked in the beam of her attention, like seals on a rock. In death, though, things got hierarchical. Finding myself lower down the ladder than I might have wanted to be, it was hard not to feel bruised. Everything seemed different somehow: up for reassessment. It was as if I had been handed a new version of an old photograph; the parts of it that, unbeknown to me, had been cropped were now fully restored, and I could only wonder at what I had missed, at what Carmen had failed to tell me.
Her funeral took place in the November, and that December I began reading Between Friends, a new collection of the letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby. I didn’t expect this book, long and loquacious, to speak to how I was feeling then; I predicted mild literary gossip and shingled hair. But I was wrong. It was just what I needed. If friendship is beautiful, it’s also intensely complicated – and now I remembered this. Outwardly, of course, Brittain and Holtby’s famous and celebrated friendship was mutually supportive, tender and generous. The two women met as undergraduates at Oxford in 1919; one fateful day, Holtby all but crashed into the room where they were both to have a tutorial. After university they shared a flat in Bloomsbury; a blue plaque now marks the spot. When Brittain later married and had children, Holtby moved in with the family, taking over the childcare when her friend had to travel, which she did often. Most famously of all, Brittain would memorialise Holtby in Testament of Friendship, a book she wrote after Winifred’s death from kidney failure in 1935 at the age of just 37.
But as the letters make plain, a lot was happening beneath the surface of their relationship – and sometimes just above it, too. They were very different in character. Holtby, who was the younger, was tall and fair and gregarious; she had a kind of inner confidence, perhaps because her mother had always encouraged her education (Brittain’s had not). During the first world war, she had interrupted her degree to serve as a nurse, but she had enjoyed the experience. In those years, she suffered no tragic personal losses. Brittain, on the other hand, was small and dark and deeply serious; in the war, she lost both her fiance, Roland Leighton, and her brother, Edward. Like Holtby, best known now as the author of South Riding, she was fiercely ambitious, but Brittain’s determination was edged with a certain neediness. Perhaps with good reason, she seemed to fear abandonment.
When Holtby moved in with Brittain and her husband, Gordon Catlin, she did so perfectly happily – and Brittain accepted it almost as her due. Stella Benson, a novelist friend of Holtby’s, regarded Brittain as a “bloodsucker”, but if she – Winifred – ever felt this herself, she never let on. Human beings (I think) may be divided, roughly speaking, into drains and radiators. Holtby was a radiator, warm and encouraging, while Brittain was a drain, more prone both to complaining and to offering “honest” criticism, though she would doubtless have been affronted to receive any in return. At moments, to use a very 21st-century term, there’s something of the frenemy about Brittain.
In a letter of 1921, she prefaces some compliments she wants to pay her friend by noting that Mrs Leighton (the late Roland’s mother) had said Holtby was “not in the least pretty”. She struggles to hide her envy of the fact that, in the race to be published first, Holtby is over the finishing line even as she is still waiting for the starting pistol (Holtby’s first novel, Anderby Wold, came out in 1923, and thereafter her books were widely acclaimed; Brittain did not have a thoroughgoing literary success until the publication of Testament of Youth in 1933).
She also has a patronising idea of what she believes Holtby needs in life (less than her). Having lost her virginity to Catlin, Brittain writes to say that for Holtby, once would be enough, sex-wise. When I first read this, I wondered if it was just a rather clumsy attempt to make Holtby feel better about her marriage by suggesting that sex was no great shakes. But there’s no getting away from it. The assumptions she makes about Holtby’s capacity for desire, born perhaps of wishful thinking (don’t ever leave me), are distinctly mean-spirited.
But as I’ve already written, friendship is complex. At other times, their affection is palpable, as toasty as a hissing gas fire. It’s inspiring to read the letters in which, as they’re finally getting started on adulthood proper, they set out their aspirations for what lies ahead. They have so many ideas about how life should be lived. In the end, they are – and they know they are – the best thing for each other: plump with questions, eager to listen, genteel disclosure their lingua franca. Can a man ever offer the same understanding to a woman as a member of her own sex?
Friendship is increasingly the focus of research by social psychologists, anthropologists, geneticists and neuroscientists, and thanks to this it can now be said with certainty that the number and quality of our friendships may have a bigger influence on our happiness, health and mortality risk than anything else in our life, except for giving up smoking. Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, reports in his book Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships that when we are lonely, and have no one to talk to or touch, our endorphin system is activated less often; endorphins are the brain’s painkillers, and thanks to this, we’re more susceptible to everyday bruising. No wonder, then, that an impoverished social life has a marked impact on anxiety and depression. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is that it also plays a part in cognitive decline, increasing the risk of dementia.
On paper, the cure for this appears straightforward: a matter of picking up the phone. But better not leave it too long. As Dunbar also notes, friendship is a matter of investment, if not hard work. Dunbar’s book was published during the pandemic; we’ll doubtless have to wait a while for the social scientists to determine Covid’s long-term effects, on our networks and our mental health. And he doesn’t have much to say, either, about the way technology has changed our connections, for better or worse. On this score, I have many questions. Have mobile phones and social media made us closer, or pushed us further apart?
Opposed as I am to gender stereotypes, I would say that this territory is particularly vexed for women – and in this, at least, Dunbar backs me. 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. While men’s perception of intimacy is primarily based, at least according to one study, on little more than frequency of contact, women have very high expectations of their relationships, especially in respect of reciprocity (mutual support) and communion (self-disclosure). Such expectations bring with them the danger of disappointment, the possibility of hurt – and it may be, too, that our society sets women against one another at moments; if the patriarchy encourages solidarity, it also sows division.
But do we envy men the seeming straightforwardness of their relationships? No, I don’t believe that we do. Whenever a man tells me what he and his friends talk about on their nights out – “music, football, books…” – I’m not envious; I’m amazed, though I really should know better by now.
In the end, though, Dunbar and his colleagues can only take us so far. Science can’t see deep inside friendship, a relationship that is as abstract as it is tangible. Clever people in white coats may be able to record an image of a brain that is grieving a lost friend, or in the midst of an agonising argument with one, but they cannot reach the emotional roots of such losses; life’s endless human drama. For some of us, in certain cases, this may be a job for the therapists. Really, though, it is the work of art: of novels and plays and poetry, of films and television series. Thinking about Carmen, the greatest reader I’ve ever known, and about Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, two writers she happened to publish, I began to feel the twitch of an idea. What if I looked at women’s friendship through the medium of an anthology, examining it from all sides, through the eyes of all manner of writers? Suddenly, it was so obvious. This was the only thing to do.
But here’s the rub. Perhaps this wasn’t only going to be a mere matter of raiding my bookshelves. Sometimes, I would tell female friends what I was working on, and almost without exception they would say, “Oh, I’ve got loads of ideas. Let me have a think and I’ll give you a list.” I soon learned not to get my hopes up. If they came back to me at all, it was inevitably to ask if I had thought of including Jane Eyre’s friendship with Helen Burns. (Yes, I had! Poor Helen’s death was the very first piece I picked out, typing it into a file on my computer with tears rolling down my cheeks.) Mostly, though, they didn’t come back to me. “It’s more difficult than I thought,” said one. She had spent her entire career in publishing, and I was caught, on hearing this, between disbelief and fear that I had unwittingly bitten off more than I could chew.
As friendship has moved centre stage in our culture – the result of feminism and, I think, of capitalism – it has become the central subject of ever greater numbers of novels. The shift towards this began slowly, after the second world war, with books such as Stella Gibbons’s Westwood, Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything and, of course, Mary McCarthy’s bestselling The Group, about the lives of eight women friends after their college graduation, and – since Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City in the 90s – the numbers have increased exponentially. Go back a bit further, however, and the relative paucity – the paucity, full stop – of fully realised and articulated friendships between women in literature strikes you with some force and, in my case, a certain amount of embarrassment.
How had I come somehow to forget that while male relationships have always been central to storytelling, women’s have been neglected? Isn’t my beloved old paperback of A Room of One’s Own, in which Virginia Woolf writes of her struggle to remember “any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends”, scribbled all over with grey pencil? Don’t I know very well that even in modern novels the love plot tends to push women’s other (because seemingly lesser) relationships from the text? I can only imagine that the wish was the mother of the thought: that I longed so much for this anthology to exist, I had convinced myself I could conjure it into being, no matter what. Like Mr Micawber, I believed, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that something would turn up.
But now I was excited. How good it would be to do something that was entirely new. Not since 1991, I discovered, had a serious anthology dedicated to the subject of friendship been published: The Oxford Book of Friendship, which was edited by the poet DJ Enright and the academic David Rawlinson (two men). When I opened this volume up, it was almost comical to find only a single brief chapter devoted to women’s friendships with one another. Was this bias or was it, as the editors insisted, because while they could “pick and choose among friendships between men, examples of friendship between women… we had to seek out”? In the past, Enright and Rawlinson note, women have written less about friendship because they have written less about anything; or less of it survived.
All I can say, after a year of my own research (oh, the dusty, leather-bound journals I have ploughed through), is that while this is certainly true, perhaps they also did not look quite hard enough. My anthology contains work by more than 100 writers, the vast majority of them women, and it covers all manner of territory, from school friendships to last goodbyes, from fallings-out to longed-for reunions, written across the centuries. As such, it is a correction, a righting of a narrative that was slightly wrong. But I hope, too, that in all its richness and wisdom, it is a companion in itself, for aren’t books also friends? In 1853, Charlotte Brontë wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell. “Thank you for your letter; it was as pleasant as a quiet chat, as welcome as spring showers, as reviving as a friend’s visit, in short, it was very like a page of Cranford.”
• The Virago Book of Friendship, edited by Rachel Cooke, is published on 5 September (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Female friendships in fiction – and between authors
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847
Jane meets Helen Burns at Lowood, a school for poor and orphaned girls. I can’t read the scene in which Helen dies from consumption as Jane lies close beside her without crying.
Sula by Toni Morrison, 1973
Nel and Sula, who grew up together in racist Ohio, come to share a terrible secret. Morrison writes so well about their solidarity, and their ability to make one another weep with laughter.
The Spare Room by Helen Garner, 2008
The pain and complexity of friendship has perhaps never been more piercingly observed than in this brilliant novel in which a woman called Nicola, who is dying of cancer, comes to stay with her friend Helen.
Lace by Shirley Conran, 1982
If Lace is still the ultimate bonkbuster, Judy, Kate, Maxine and Pagan were also models (of a sort) for many of us, their struggle for autonomy in a man’s world every bit as important as what they do in the bedroom.
The Memories of LM by Ida Baker, 1971
The writer Katherine Mansfield met Ida Baker at school in 1903, and they were lifelong friends. But it was a toxic relationship – as people found out when Mansfield’s diaries were published after her death. This is Baker’s painful attempt to set the record straight.
Mary McCarthy’s eulogy for Hannah Arendt, New York Review of Books, 1976
Rarely has anyone better captured a friend on the page: her appearance (“a magnificent diva”), her habits (anchovy paste for breakfast), her character (“she did not wish to be known, in that curiously finite way”).
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813
Elizabeth Bennet’s best friend, the sensible and clever Charlotte Lucas, marries a man (the unctuous Mr Collins) whom Lizzie doesn’t care for: a test of a relationship that still chimes with women two centuries later.
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, 1996
Solidarity takes many forms, and sometimes it arrives in the guise of white wine, hummus and a party-size tiramisu: all of which are scoffed by Bridget, Shaz and Jude as they strategise over the latter’s boyfriend, Vile Richard.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith, 2016
What happens when the lives of friends diverge? The relationship between Smith’s unnamed narrator and Tracey in Swing Time is pitch-perfect: a relationship that begins in childhood with sudden recognition, and ends with, first, awkwardness, and then, rage.
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, 1952
Shopping trips may be the occasion of massive passive aggression between close friends, and so it proves in Excellent Women, when Dora and Mildred visit a department store in search of new frocks: “I’ve come to the conclusion that we should avoid brown…” RC
