A fond, fascinated look at women's friendship through the fiction, diaries, and letters of friends

Friendship, a timeless subject, has never been more debated, something that has to do both with the internet - the perils of WhatsApp groups, the agony of ghosting - as well as with a growing awareness that loneliness is increasing in our society. Friendship has become a matter of urgent inquiry to therapists, scientists and sociologists. We understand its importance more and more, not only as a comfort and a privilege, but as vital to our health. But it's hard to get inside friendship: its particular intensity and its miraculous ease; its tendency to wax and wane; its ability to inspire both delight and despair.

This is the territory of novels and poems, diaries and letters, comics and graphic novels - and it is where the innovative and wide ranging Virago Book of Friendship steps in, bringing together work by more than 100 writers. From Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters and Meg Wolitzer and, it celebrates and investigates friendship between women from first encounters to final goodbyes, from falling out to making up again.