Female friendship has been a subject of fiction for as long as women have been writing it, but it has historically received less critical attention than the canonical treatments of male friendship or romantic love. This is starting to shift: the novels that examine the bonds between women — their intensity, their competition, their mutual sustenance, the particular way they can be vehicles for both liberation and cruelty — have found more serious critical engagement in the last two decades. What these books share is a refusal to treat female friendship as secondary to romantic narrative or as simply a staging ground for it.
Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, beginning with My Brilliant Friend (2011), is the defining treatment of female friendship in contemporary fiction. Elena and Lila's relationship spans sixty years, and it is defined by a mutual recognition that shades into envy, admiration, competition, dependence, and resentment in proportions that shift continuously across the series. What Ferrante captures with unusual precision is the way that female friendship can be simultaneously the most intimate relationship in a woman's life and also the most painful — that the closeness is inseparable from the danger, because the person who knows you best also knows exactly how to wound you.
Toni Morrison's Sula (1973) examines a friendship between two Black women in the Bottom, a Black community in Ohio, across the first half of the twentieth century. Nel and Sula are defined in opposition to each other and also in terms of each other, and their falling-out — over a man, but also over fundamentally different ways of understanding freedom and obligation — is handled by Morrison without assigning clear moral fault. What Morrison is interested in is what each woman represents for the other and for the community, and what the loss of the friendship costs them individually and collectively.
Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life (2015) is primarily about male friendship, but the relationships in the novel — the depth of care, the way that friendship becomes a structure for survival — apply across gender. For a specifically female friendship with similar intensity, Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere (2017) examines two women whose friendship is defined by the differences in their social positions: Elena Richardson, securely established in a wealthy Ohio suburb, and Mia Warren, a nomadic artist who rents Elena's cottage. The novel is about what it costs to maintain different kinds of freedom, and how women's friendships are shaped by the material conditions that determine what freedom is available to each.
Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1985) takes female friendship in adolescence and renders it with the intensity that only adolescence can produce: the absolute centrality of a best friend, the sudden and total rupture, the sense that this loss is the original template for every loss that follows. The friendship between Annie and her unnamed best friend in Antigua is one of the most precisely rendered in fiction, and Kincaid understands it as a developmental stage rather than simply a social arrangement — a period in which the self is still forming and the friend is both mirror and limit.
Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything (1958) is less well-known than the novels above but is a document of a specific historical moment: five women working in publishing in 1950s New York, their friendships, their ambitions, and the constraints of a world organized to limit both. Jaffe was writing from observation — she worked at Fawcett Publications — and what she captured was the female workplace friendship as a survival mechanism: women supporting each other within systems designed to pit them against each other for male attention and approval. The novel was recently rediscovered as a document of what professional women's lives actually looked like before second-wave feminism changed the available options.
For a contemporary take, Tayari Jones's Silver Sparrow (2011) examines a friendship that develops between two women who do not initially know they share a father. The novel is at its most interesting when it examines how the friendship reconfigures once the shared history becomes known — how an intimate bond can survive the revelation that it was built on an asymmetry of knowledge, and what it means to feel that you were not the recipient of the same honesty you gave.