Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
In addition to being one of the most beloved novels of all time, Austen’s 1813 classic may also be the greatest novel ever written about sisters. Heroine Elizabeth Bennet is one of five. Sensible older sister Jane is her best friend, but flibbertigibbet younger sisters Lydia and Catherine are the cause of much eye rolling (and even more embarrassment). When Lydia disgraces herself, however, the sisters close ranks. It was Austen’s genius to realize that, when it comes to sisters, love and exasperation go together.
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
The trope of sisters as both caretakers and best friends is on even more robust display in Jane Austen’s first published novel (from 1811). A dual love story about sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, the book presents an almost idealized version of sister relations that might have irked me if it hadn’t been written by Jane Austen (and been so damn good!). Financial and romantic troubles dominate the novel, as various misunderstandings leave both sisters estranged from the men they love. What is never in doubt, however, is the love the sisters have for each other.
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
I must be one of a handful of female novelists in America who, as a child, didn’t devour this American classic, first published in 1868, and identify with aspiring writer and tomboy Jo March. Reading it for the first time in my early forties, I admit that I found this tale of four impoverished sisters trying to “be good” in small-town Massachusetts to be hopelessly corny. But I did identify with the way that each of the four sisters was labeled in the family—with Jo as the impulsive one; Amy, the vain one; Beth, the selfless one; and Meg, the proper one.
Middlemarch, George Eliot
This masterpiece of nineteenth-century English literature isn’t typically thought of as a “sisters novel,” but the different paths taken by heroine Dorothea Brooke and her less idealistic, more practical sister, Celia (who marries the suitor who Dorothea rejects), are a reminder that sisters can be incredibly close—and incredibly different—all at the same time. The Brooke sisters are also a painful reminder of the way that women’s choices were once so thoroughly prescribed by the men they married.
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
I can’t say I actually enjoyed reading this cult classic about orphaned sisters in the Pacific Northwest, published in 1980, but the book stayed with me and even haunted me long after I turned the last page. After their mother drives her car off a cliff, sisters Lucille and Ruth, who are left in the care of various unreliable relatives in a falling-down house, become soul mates—at least until teenage Lucille rebels and takes off. The book made me realize how close sisters can be and also how fragile the bonds that tie family together really are.
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
Smiley’s 1991 reimagining of King Lear, set on a family farm in Iowa, features all the grand motifs that Shakespeare brought to his 1606 tragedy—madness, betrayal, etc.—but also Smiley’s no-nonsense prose, which makes the sensational revelations that emerge that much more dramatic. As told from the perspective of eldest sister Ginny, the novel paints a picture of siblings who, if far less evil than Goneril and Regan, have relationships with each other that are every bit as complicated. (And I love complicated.)
Also keep in mind:
The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard
The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Cathleen Schine
The Believers, Zoë Heller
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez
In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner
The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd