At Vulture.com Hillary Kelly tagged seven great books on female friendship not written by Elena Ferrante, including:
An Experiment in Love, by Hilary Mantel (1996)
Long before Mantel chronicled Anne Boleyn’s long waltz to the guillotine in her iconic Wolf Hall series, she wrote this smart, slim novel about a trio of impoverished girls who first meet as young children and matriculate from a North England convent school. Moving together to the lonely dormitories of a London university in the upswing of the late 1960s, Carmel, Karina, and Julianne face the “Sophies” — city girls with more money, more taste, and more men. While the girls are implicitly encouraged to achieve without overachieving, they dance hesitantly around the sexual revolution that’s beginning to upend the roles into which they thought they were born.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
