One of the unexpected pleasures afforded by running SomethingRhymed.com is the chance to speak about female literary friendship on stage as well as write about it on screen. And so, Emily Midorikawa and I are particularly delighted to have been offered the opportunity to present some of our discoveries tomorrow evening, October 15th, at the Ilkley Playhouse as part of the Ilkley Festival Fringe.

We’ll be sharing what we’ve found out about the friendships of two of Yorkshire’s best-loved authors, Charlotte Brontë and Winifred Holtby, as well as revealing the surprising literary alliances enjoyed by both Jane Austen and George Eliot.

We are particularly proud that our Ilkley Festival Fringe event follows the SI Leeds Literary Prize ceremony, since this award ‘aims to act as a loudspeaker for Black and Asian women’s voices, and a platform to discover exciting new talent, from a group largely under-represented on our bookshelves’.

Emily was a runner-up in 2012, so we also have personal reasons for feeling delighted to continue our relationship with Soroptimist International – an organisation that fosters just the kind of sisterly solidarity that we celebrate on Something Rhymed.