8 stories about sisters
classics, literary fiction, plays and more, about the complicated dynamics of sisters
Margaret and Helen Schlegel are sisters with very different ideas about how to live. Margaret is measured and patient while Helen is passionate and impulsive. When their lives become entangled with the Wilcoxes, a wealthy and practical family, the gap between the sisters begins to widen. Forster writes with precision and warmth, and beneath the Edwardian drawing rooms and country houses runs a deeper question about what truly connects us to one another. It is a quiet novel with a great deal to say.
After the sudden death of their sister Nicky, Avery, Bonnie and Lucky return to their childhood apartment in New York to prepare it for sale. Grief brings them back into close quarters, but so do unfinished arguments. Avery is in recovery and quietly afraid of relapse, Bonnie is struggling to redefine herself after her boxing career falters, and Lucky’s glamorous modelling life hides its own fragility. As they sift through Nicky’s belongings and the history embedded in the apartment walls, old patterns re-emerge. The novel moves between past and present, revealing how each sister was shaped by the same volatile upbringing in different ways. It’s a sharp, intimate study of loss, addiction and the bonds that remain even when everything else fractures.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Lisbon sisters fascinate everyone in their suburban neighbourhood, yet no one truly knows them. Told from the perspective of the local boys, looking back years later, the novel circles around five sisters who remain forever slightly out of reach. Eugenides writes with a dreamy, hypnotic quality and the mystery at the heart of the story is never quite resolved. It is melancholic and strangely beautiful, a novel about adolescence and the unknowability of others.
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Olga, Masha and Irina live in a provincial Russian town, far from the Moscow of their childhood. They dream of returning, of lives that feel more meaningful, but the years keep passing and nothing quite changes. Chekhov fills the play with longing and small disappointments, with conversations that circle around what no one can say directly. Very little happens in terms of plot. Everything happens in terms of feeling. It is one of the great plays about the gap between the life you imagined and the life you have.
Jayne Baek has come to New York to become someone new, but beneath her carefully constructed independence she is locked in a destructive battle with food and control. Her older sister June appears self-possessed and successful, the sibling who escaped their fractured childhood intact. When June is diagnosed with cancer and needs surgery, the sisters are forced into reluctant proximity. What begins as a practical arrangement becomes an emotional reckoning. As June’s illness unfolds, so too does Jayne’s struggle with her eating disorder, and long-held resentments are finally confronted. The novel is raw and darkly funny, but at its core it is about the uneasy tenderness of sisterhood and the frightening vulnerability of letting someone see you fully.
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
Here is a quietly devastating novel following three very different sisters; Lucy, Charlotte and Vera, from youth into adulthood, charting how their marriages shape the course of their lives. What begins as a portrait of close domestic bonds gradually reveals how isolation, emotional cruelty and social expectation can fracture a family. With psychological precision, Whipple shows how sisterly love can endure even when life takes each woman in radically different directions.
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Sally and Gillian Owens were raised by their aunts in a house where the garden grows new things without being planted and love is treated with suspicion. The family has a history of witchcraft, and a curse that means any man who falls for an Owens woman is doomed. Sally is cautious and grounded. Gillian is reckless and restless. The novel follows them into adulthood, as the bond between them is tested by love and death and magic. It is warm, strange and full of longing.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Set in a small English town on the cusp of social change, this quietly absorbing novel follows Molly Gibson as her orderly life with her widowed father is disrupted by his impulsive second marriage. Suddenly she must navigate a new household shaped by vanity, ambition and shifting loyalties. At its centre is Molly’s complicated bond with her stepsister Cynthia, whose charm and secrecy draw admiration and suspicion in equal measure. As courtships bloom and reputations falter, Molly finds herself entangled in misunderstandings that test her steadiness and sense of self. With warmth and gentle irony, Gaskell explores affection, rivalry and the fragile alliances that form between young women learning how to make their way in the world.
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previously on the reading list…
This is a great selection. I’ve always appreciated how writers like Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell handle the complexities of sisterhood—it’s such a rich theme for exploring human nature. I’ve read a few of these, but there are some titles here that are new to me. It’s a reminder of how that specific bond can be both a sanctuary and a source of tension. Great curation.
Little Women