‘One of the Highest Forms of Friendship’: Brother-Sister Relationships in Women’s Autobiography

Abstract

Traditional Victorian autobiography by men is dominated by the difficulties of the parent-child — especially father-son — relationship. None of the great names in the field has much to say about sibling relationships. This was something that largely disappeared with the last of the Romantics, Thomas De Quincey and Leigh Hunt. John Stuart Mill, for example, though the eldest of a large family of brothers and sisters, focuses almost entirely on his intense relationship with his father, while Anthony Trollope mentions his five siblings in passing, but four died of tuberculosis, and he seems not to have been particularly close to any of them. Charles Darwin recalls being taught by his sister Caroline, and being slower in learning than his younger sister Catherine,³ but Newman says nothing about his family relationships in childhood (indeed very little about his childhood altogether), despite his close relationship with two of his sisters, Harriett and Jemima, and the death of a third, Mary, in her late teens. There is no sense in any of the major male autobiographers of the period that relationships with brothers or sisters were at all significant. With their female contemporaries, however, the picture is markedly different, as Harriet Martineau explains in her Autobiography:

Brothers are to sisters what sisters can never be to brothers as objects of engrossing and devoted affection. The law of their frames is answerable for this: and that other law — of equity — which sisters are bound to obey, requires that they should not render their account of their disappointments where there can be no lair reply. Under the same law, sisters are bound to remember that they cannot be certain of their own titness to render an account of their own disappointments, or to form an estimate of the share of blame which may be due to themselves on the score of unreasonable expectations.⁴

My doll seemed lifeless and no girlish toy Had any reason when my brother came.¹

Little by little we never met again.²