Friendship 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. Friendship has become a matter of inquiry to therapists, scientists and sociologists. We understand its importance, 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 delight and despair.

Rachel Cooke is the editor of the Virago Book for Friendship (£18.99) which explores this territory in novels and poems, diaries and letters, comics and graphic novels. From Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters and Meg Wolitzer and, she celebrates and investigates friendship between women from first encounters to final goodbyes, from falling out to making up again.

Rachel writes for the Observer and the New Statesman and is also the author of Her Brilliant Career: ten extraordinary women of the 1950s.

In conversation with Graham Caveney

Refreshments included