Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, but the world's most celebrated female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their investigations into a wealth of surprising collaborations, such as the friendships between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe or Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Drawing on letters and diaries,...

This glamorous and hugely popular actress raised herself from brutal poverty to Academy Award-winning stardom by guts, determination and hard work. During her fifty-year career, she made over eighty films. But her obsessive perfectionism led to the later caricature of coat-hanger-wielding harridan that even the adoration of fans could not counter. Still, she has endured as one of the most popular icons of the movies, an early role model to a million...