The term “romantic friendship” was coined in eighteenth-century England to describe relationships between women that were passionate, intense, and exclusive. The sexual potential of such relationships were seldom discussed by those outside the dyad. When two women of the aristocracy, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, ran off together in 1778, their friends were relieved to know that “no serious impropriety had been committed” because, as one of them wrote, “There were no gentlemen concerned, nor does it appear to be anything more than a scheme of Romantic Friendship.” Romantic friendship between women, depicted in several eighteenth- and nineteen-century American literary works, was described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1849 as “a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life.” The term “Boston marriage” was coined in the late nineteenth century, when women’s increasing economic independence—enjoyed particularly by the “New Woman”—meant that their same-sex love relationship need no longer be a “rehearsal” for heterosexual marriage. With the popular dissemination in the twentieth century of the ideas of late-nineteenth sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, romantic friendships and Boston marriages came under suspicion as being “sexually inverted” or “lesbian” and therefore pathological.

In this chapter, female homosocial relationships are explored as confident articulations of female identity and as suggestive models of political governance. Despite widespread anxiety about female-only assembly and scepticism regarding the virtues of female friendship, women writers in this period evidently found friendship between women to be a theme in which they could articulate and explore a range of feelings and emotions not otherwise sanctioned by their culture. The chapter considers a range of poetry and fiction – by Charlotte McCarthy, Margaret Goddard, Olivia Elder, Frances Sheridan, and her daughter Elizabeth – in relation to differentially situated ideas of ‘sisterhood’ before turning to the ways in which Ireland came to be figured as a ‘sister’ kingdom to Britain in the later century, thus shaping the proto-feminism of earlier traditions in new, national formations.