ABSTRACT
Female friendship seems to have reached a significant stage in its history. In 1987 Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum published Bittersweet: facing up to feelings of love, envy and competition in women’s friendships. The Famous Five, a children’s book popular in this period, includes a boy-girl character very similar to the author's youthful self. A girls’ school is the perfect place for gender-bending. A flash of her dusky profile across a crowded quad, and the author's heart bounded in ecstasy. Safe in the sanctuary of our single-sex school, people did not have to endure the odium of comparisons with the unfair sex. Female friendship provided plenty of chances for revenge, though. The peculiar nature of female friendship, for the author, is the mixture of sympathy and instruction: of a loving heart and a shrewd eye.
