LITERARY SISTERS: DOROTHY WEST AND HER CIRCLE, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE. By Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2012. xiv + 200 pp. $72, cloth; $24.95, paperback.The subtitle of Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle, A Biography of the Harlem may seem like a misnomer. Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis's book is an account of the creative and personal alliances that Dorothy West (1907-98) and her cousin, the poet Helene Johnson (1906-95), forged that extended well beyond the New Negro movement and their well-documented friendships with peers such as Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman. However, by taking what they describe as a national, global, and multidisciplinary approach to the Harlem Renaissance (2) and placing their subjects' relationships with their fellow black writers in conversation with those with white, often upper-class British and American women, such as theater director Cheryl Crawford and agent and producer Elisabeth Marbury, Mitchell and Davis undermine the enduring assumption that black women writers of this period were more socially segregated and provincial-and less queer-than their male counterparts. The men were not having all the fun while the women (besides Hurston) were worrying about respectability in their Harlem salons. This book invites readers to think about West and Johnson and their work in interracial contexts not determined by the dynamics of patronage.Mitchell and Davis acknowledge the challenges West and Johnson pose to biographers. Johnson was an extremely private woman who withdrew from public life after her marriage in 1933, granted no interviews, and (unlike West) showed no interest in asserting her place in Harlem history. Mitchell's edition of This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem (2006) fills in many of the gaps in Johnson's life and gives context for Johnson's depiction in this volume. Understandably, West dominates the book; Johnson effectively disappears after her engagement. As much a challenge as Johnson's reticence is West's self-mythologizing, especially regarding her family's financial circumstances and social standing among Boston's black elite.An early chapter on Pauline Hopkins traces a geohistorical lineage for West and Johnson and provides not only a valuable history of black intellectual Boston but also an innovative context for their careers. Hopkins's family background, which Lois Brown's comprehensive biography Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Daughter of the Revolution (2008) demonstrates, is a history of black Boston; it provides the cultural context for West's depiction of what Adelaide M. Cromwell calls in The Other Brahmins: Boston's Upper Class, 1750-1950 (1994) the Black Brahmin society in West's novel The Living Is Easy (1948). West rather implausibly claimed not to know her fellow Harlem writers, including The Crisis editor Jessie Fauset and novelist Nella Larsen, and she never admitted to any author's influence on her work; Mitchell and Davis read Hopkins's lifelong singlehood and discreet, sexually ambiguous lifestyle (42), as well as her nonheteronormative representations, as models for West's own life and work. Rather than emphasizing a predictable commonality with Fauset and Larsen, Mitchell and Davis detail Hopkins's deep roots in Boston history, her early career in the theater, her founding and editing of The Colored American Magazine (1900-1905), and her representations of Boston in novels such as Contending Forces (1900) and Of One Blood (1903) as a professional and artistic backdrop for their portrayal of West. Mitchell and Davis argue that, facing sexism, professional hardship, and political marginalization, Hopkins's solution, and one that Dorothy West was to follow, was to single-handedly create her own audience, primarily of women, through intellectual relationships, literary and artistic organizations, and the two magazines she edited (67). …