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Start giftingThey Were Sisters
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Learn moreWhen three sisters marry very different men, the choices they make determine whether they will flourish, be tamed or be repressed. Set in 1930’s middle-class England, the classic domestic drama, They Were Sisters, is a compelling but harrowing novel by Dorothy Whipple.
Meet three women with contrasting partners: Lucy's husband is her beloved companion; Vera's husband bores her and she turns elsewhere; and Charlotte's husband is a horrifying bully who turns a high-spirited naive young girl into a deeply unhappy woman. This is the story of how those marriages shape the sister’s lives, the consequences of their decisions, and the sisterly love that hopes to save them from tragedy.
They Were Sisters is part of the Persephone Audiobook Collection, a series of forgotten classics that includes neglected fiction and non-fiction by women writers. This audiobook of a novel first published in 1943 breathes new life into Whipple's work; with a fascinating introduction by novelist Celia Brayfield.
Born in 1893, Dorothy Whipple had a happy childhood in Blackburn as part of a large extended family. She worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham, where she wrote all her eight novels. Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight and They Were Sisters, were made into films. Returning in her last years to Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple died there in 1966.