TSP’s reference section: Help us grow it by adding your knowledge.
LIKE WE ALWAYS SAY: If you want to be a better sister, read. What follows is the start of a booklist for sisters–fiction and non-fiction alike. Please add suggested additions in the comments space, so that with your help, the list can grow. [click to continue…]
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SISTERS. YOU GOTTA love ‘em. Or at the very least you have to worship them, for without nine classical sisters, there would be no creative inspiration and no intellectual activity. Come to think of it, maybe that is what’s wrong with the world today: No one’s talking to the Muses. [click to continue…]
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THE OBVIOUS choice of sister fiction is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, the standard about sisters Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth March’s daily experiences as young women in the late nineteenth century. Also predictable, but more up to date: Think Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, perhaps, or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the four-book young-adult series by Ann Brashares. At TSP, though, we sisters hate to be simply obvious. Here are some of our staff picks:
FROM ANASTASIA SMITH OF ‘CLAIMING SISTERHOOD’
•BEEZUS AND RAMONA, by BEVERLY CLEARY As a part of a series about the commonly misunderstood antics of Ramona Quimby, this young-adult novel portrays the comic (and constant) ruckus that 4-year-old Ramona causes in her older sister’s life. [click to continue…]
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SOMETIMES WE wonder why sisters behave badly toward one another, and then quickly remember that the reason they do so is because they simply haven’t read enough literature.
Haven’t they read Austen (portrayed by her sister at left)? Have they utterly forgotten their Bronte? When sisters squabble, we send them into the stacks. Forget therapy, and adopt the therapeutic motto: What would EB do? EB? Elizabeth Bennett, of course, that cool head of Pride and Prejudice, sister to two wacky and one hopelessly beautiful sister, daughter to a positively unforgivable mother, and a loving but somewhat hapless father, manages to find the kind of steadfast love we would all like to have. [click to continue…]
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THE AUSTENS, the Brontes, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay. What do these women have in common? Other than being fine writers, each has a sister who was the great woman behind her success.
Cassandra Austen
Jane Austen
For Cassandra (1773-1845) and Jane Austen (1775-1817), the only girls of eight siblings, it seems predestined that they would become one another’s best friend and confidante. What is less obvious is why Cassandra, at age 70, burned Jane’s letters, leaving some people with the odd impression that Jane was bland or worse, retiring.
As any sister will tell you, a sister–especially one with some age on her side–protects a sister, and despite the fact that we might like to never forgive the act of the bonfire, we understand the intent. It was Jane, after all, who once said of herself, “If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it.” [click to continue…]
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ELSEWHERE IN SISTERPEDIA: The Bronte Sisters
First time here? Here's the idea: The Sister Project is a network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood. A sisterhood of sister blogs, you could say. Whatever sister means to you, from identical twin to sister-in-law (or in friendship or in feminism), we’ll make room to listen in about it or express it on TSP. Like the slogan up top on our homepage says, “Don’t you have something to say to your sister?” We've got galleries of art and literature by and about sisters, and a Sisterpedia of sisterly trivia...but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The quick study: Learn more about TSP, and how to find your way around. And oh—a giant, sisterly welcome.