Some resolutions are better than others, but McCarthy was interested in a realistic portrait of how the lives of these women were likely to turn out. Polly was the most sympathetic and attractive character of those whose story is told in detail.Īs The Group is not chicklit, there are few fairytale endings for the women in this novel. I didn't like Libby much at all and found Kay and Dottie very naive. The novel is written in the third person and sometimes the writing distances the reader from the characters – we can often see a lot that they do not. I think McCarthy was more concerned with the issues she wanted to write about and portraying the experience of her generation of women than with creating likeable characters. These women are intelligent and highly educated, and come from quite a privileged section of society, but as women in a very sexist society they soon face a lot of difficulties.

Meanwhile, the cracks in Kay's marriage to Harald are soon apparent – she would have liked to work in the theatre but needs to take a job in Macy's earning money while he pontificates himself out of the job she would have loved to do. One of my favourite chapters was about Priss's struggle to breastfeed her newborn son in hospital, and her feeling of being caught between conflicting theories about feeding and caring for a newborn baby. The sex scenes are quite explicit but not very romantic. The story opens with a wedding – Kay is the first of 'the group' to get married and the other seven women all attend – then the narrative shifts between several different group members.ĭottie loses her virginity to a man she meets at Kay's wedding and goes to get herself fitted with contraception, and the frankness of these chapters quite early in the book must have been quite shocking when it was first published. McCarthy herself graduated from Vassar in 1933 as do her characters, though I didn't have a sense that any one character was based on her. First published in 1963, this novel is about the lives of a group of young women after leaving college in 1933, including careers, relationships, sex, babies, parents, and money. So writes Candace Bushnell, the writer behind the TV series Sex and the City, in the introduction to this new Virago Modern Classics edition of The Group by Mary McCarthy. Given the attention paid to relations between the sexes, it would be tempting to call The Group a forerunner of today's chick lit. Summary: A reprint of a feminist classic about the lives and loves of a group of young women in 1930s America

The group by mary mccarthy