Brother-Sister Collaborative Relationships

Abstract

From the Lambs to the Sitwells, the late eighteenth to the twentieth century produced a succession of literary families whose collaborative relationships generated poems, novels, journals, letters, legends, mysteries, and speculative psychoanalytical responses. The most common configuration of these family groups was the brother-sister pair or trio: hence Henry and Sarah Fielding, Charles and Mary Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Benjamin and Sarah Disraeli, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Rossetti, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and in the United States, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and William, Henry and Alice James. Sister-sister pairs, by contrast, are rare — unless one breaks down the Brontë group, or looks at minor writers such as Maria and Geraldine Jewsbury; brother-brother equally so, unless one separates the Rossettis, or looks to Germany for the Brothers Grimm. In most cases, there was something about the interaction of the sexes that was more fruitful of literary achievement than the same-sex partnership.KeywordsLiterary HistoryCollaborative RelationshipLiterary FamilySister PairLiterary AchievementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.