The Friendships of Women

by William Rounseville Alger

The three wonderful sisters, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, were joined by uncommonly deep and intense bonds. Their strange, fervid personalities; their solitary, melancholy lives; their tastes and pursuits; their joys and triumphs, were held in common. Writing to her best friend, Charlotte says, "You, my dear Miss W., know, as well as I do, the value of sisters' affection to each other; there is nothing like it in this world, I believe, when they are nearly equal in age, and similar in education, tastes, and sentiments." In another letter, written after she had lost both her sisters, she says, "Emily had a particular love for the moors; and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne's delight; and, when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon." Let any one, who would understand what these rare natures felt for each other, read the memoir of her two sisters, prefixed by Charlotte to "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey."

In 1846, Margaret Fuller wrote an account of a visit she had just paid to Joanna Baillie, whom she had long honored almost above any of her sex. She says, "I found on her brow, not, indeed, a coronal of gold, but a serenity and strength undimmed and unbroken by the weight of more than fourscore years, or by the scanty appreciation which her thoughts have received. We found her in her little calm retreat, at Hampstead, surrounded by marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends. Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and full of active kindness, whose character, and their mutual relations, she has, in one of her last poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline." This admirable, semi-biographical, semi-psychological poem was addressed by Joanna to her sister Agnes, her dear, life-long companion, on one of the latest anniversaries of her birthday. It is an interesting fragment in the literature of the friendships of sisters.

THE friendship of woman with woman, outside of the ties of blood, is pictured with varying degrees of fidelity in the works of many romance writers and novelists. One of the most glowing delineations of it, also one of the most famous, is given by Richardson in the character of Clarissa Harlowe. Jane Austen, in her "Northanger Abbey," treats it with great insight, in the relations of Catherine Morland, Isabella Thorpe, and Eleanor Tilney. Miss Edgeworth's "Helen" is likewise full of it: both its sympathies and its antagonisms are forcibly depicted. Helen Stanley is Lady Cecilia's double, her second self, her better self. Lady Katrine Hawksby is such an acidified piece of envy, so jealous of all her sex, that "every commonly decent marriage of her acquaintance gives her a sad headache." That there is truth in this bitter stroke cannot be denied; but there is truth as well in the extreme opposite. Many a girl, with a sublime self-renunciation, stifling an agony sharper than death, has given up a lover to a friend, in silence and secrecy. Women are capable of any sacrifice, and their grandest deeds are hidden. Could any woman capable of voluntarily withdrawing herself, in order that her friend might marry the man they both loved, be capable of boasting of it, or willingly letting it be known?

Mrs. Barbauld gives a beautiful description of pious friendship in her hymn beginning,

How blest the sacred tie that binds
In union sweet according minds!
How swift the heavenly course they run
Whose hearts, whose faith and hope, are one!
Their streaming tears together flow
For human grief and mortal woe;
Their ardent prayers together rise
Like mingling flames in sacrifice.

Pictures of female friendships, in all their glory and tragedy, their ecstatic fusions and heroic sacrifices, their bitter jealousies and inversions, abound in the great dramatists, who are the crowned expositors of human nature. Auger, Secretary of the French Academy, in his "Philosophical and Literary Miscellanies," has an excellent little essay entitled, "The Friendships of Women among themselves compared with the Friendships of Men among themselves; Difference of the two Friendships, and the Causes of that Difference." The essay, though not adequate, is true and suggestive. Charles Lamb's poem of "The Three Friends, "—Mary, Martha, and Margaret—is an extremely truthful and effective description of female friendship, its fervor, jealousy, estrangement, generosity, and restoration.

Grace Aguilar has written a work expressly on the subject of Woman's Friendship. Though not a work of a high order, it possesses considerable interest as a tale; and, as a treatment of the theme, it is full of sincere feeling and discriminating observations. In Lady Ida Villiers and Florence Leslie we have a picture of a pair of noble friends, proof against every trial. The black-hearted falsehood and hate of Flora Rivers form an effective foil; and, incidentally, there are many telling strokes and sidelights on the relations of women to each other. "It is the fashion to deride female friendship," Grace Aguilar says: "to look with scorn on those who profess it. There is always to me a doubt of the warmth, the strength, and purity of her feelings, when a girl merges into womanhood, looking down on female friendship as romance and folly." The subtile and masterly knowledge of the characters of women, their weaknesses and their strengths, is not the least of the charms of that consummate work of art, "The Princess" of Tennyson. Blanche, Melissa, Ida, Psyche, in their unions, Two women faster welded in one love Than pairs of wedlock, in their jealousies, quarrels, aspirations, sorrows, are psychological studies full of delicate truth. Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" discusses many of the same topics, in a manner characteristically contrasting with Tennyson's, but marked by all her own conscientiousness, power, and care. Lady Waldemar, Marian Erle, Aurora Leigh, with the unsparing censures, magnanimous thoughts, and burning aspirations strewn through this profound and massive work, are lasting lessons for all womankind. It seems to have been much easier for most of the critics of this great work to feel its artistic faults, its jarring metre, and cumbrous forms, than to appreciate the transcendent nobleness and wisdom wrought into it from the soul of its creator.

School-girl friendships are a proverb in all mouths. They form one of the largest classes of those human attachments whose idealizing power and sympathetic interfusions glorify the world and sweeten existence. With what quick trust and ardor, what eager relish, these susceptible creatures, before whom heavenly illusions float, surrender themselves to each other, taste all the raptures of confidential conversation, lift veil after veil till every secret is bare, and, hand in hand, with glowing feet, tread the paths of paradise Perhaps a more impassioned portrayal of this kind of union is not to be found in literature than the picture in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," which Shakespeare makes Helena hold before Hermia, when the death of their love was threatened by the appearance of Lysander and Demetrius:

Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us, O! is all forgot?
All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles ccreated both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides; voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.
And will you rend our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?

Romantically warm and generous as the friendships of school-boys are, those of school-girls are much more so. They are more purposed and absorbing, more sedulously cultivated and consciously important. School-girls often have their distinctly defined and well-understood degrees of intimacy—their first, their second, their third, friend. Thus a thousand little dramas are daily played, full of delights and woes, of which outsiders, who have no key to them, never so much as dream. Probably no chapter of sentiment in modern fashionable life is so intense and rich as that which covers the experience of budding maidens at school. In their mental caresses, spiritual nuptials, their thoughts kiss each other, and more than all the blessedness the world will ever give them is foreshadowed. They have not yet reached the age for a public record or confession of their pangs and raptures; so these dramas are for the most part only guessed at. But keener agonies, more delicious passages, are nowhere else known than in the bosoms of innocent school-girls, in the lacerations or fruitions of their first consciously given affections. A startling illustration has come to the knowledge of the writer just as he is penning these words. Two girls, about sixteen years old, attending a private school together, in one of the chief cities of the United States, formed a strong attachment to each other, and were almost inseparable. The father of one of the girls, for some reason, had a dislike for the other, and forbade his daughter to associate with her. The two friends preferred death to separation. They took laudanum, and were found dead in each other's arms. What element of romance or tragedy ever known, is not every day experienced, all about us, under the thin disguise of commonplace?