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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor of The Spectator.

My guest this week is the writer Rachel Cook,

whose new book is The Virago Book of Friendship, which is a sort of anthology of all sorts of, well, God,

not just fiction, but poetry, comics, letters, memoirs, journals, orations, bearing on the

theme of female friendship in particular. Rachel, when you set out to do this book, you discovered quite a fast that there was

nothing like it, which slightly surprised me.

Yeah, I was surprised too.

It just goes to show that when you have an idea and you think, well, that's too obvious.

It's actually worth pursuing it because there's an Oxford book of friendship.

And it's very good and scholarly, it's edited it came out in 1991 and it's edited by the poet DJ Enright and an Australian

academic called David Rawlinson and it's got about 300 authors in it, of whom about 45 are women.

And it has a tiny section devoted to friendships between women.

So there's no other book like mine, and that was weird to me.

However, the flip side of that is that I had forgotten something which I had known since I was a student,

which is that for a very, very long time, and I would say probably until the Second World War,

the love plot in books tended to push out women's friendship

because as soon as a woman in a book is in love or about to be married,

her friends kind of disappear.

So although no one had done it before,

it was also much harder than I had expected to find what I was looking for, you know, particularly pre-Jane Austin.

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