Although many critics, like Mailer, argued that her earlier, less well-known works showed greater promise – her first novel, The Company She Keeps, published in 1942, or the autobiographical Memories of a Catholic Girlhood – The Group would become more influential than any of them. Despite the fact that The Group went on to top the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years, the experience was still raw enough for McCarthy to admit in a 1989 newspaper interview shortly before her death that she thought The Group had 'ruined my life'.Īnd yet it is for The Group that McCarthy is best remembered. She was shunned by her former university contemporaries, many of whom felt they had been mercilessly pilloried in the book. At a dinner party in New York two months after its publication, the 51-year-old McCarthy burst into tears when a fellow guest admitted that he did not like the book, and when her close friend, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, wrote a mean-spirited satire in the Partisan Review, McCarthy was hurt and puzzled by the betrayal.įor years afterwards, McCarthy received letters from irate readers accusing her of a 'perverted outlook on life'. In spite of her status as one of America's leading women of letters, a writer with a reputation for acerbic insights and penetrating prose, she found that the intellectual, liberal circles in which she moved were quick to disparage her bestseller as little more than a superficial potboiler.

The book's author, Mary McCarthy, was not expecting such a furore.

Norman Mailer, a man whose own writing did not shy away from graphic depictions of the sexual act, dismissed The Group in the New York Review of Books as 'a trivial lady writer's novel' infused with a 'communal odour is a cross between Ma Griffe and contraceptive jelly'. Its frank descriptions of sex, contraception and breast-feeding as they affected a group of eight female graduates in 1930s America caused such a scandal that the novel was banned in Australia as an offence to public morals.

W hen it was first published in 1963, The Group rapidly became a book that everyone read without wanting to admit it.

The Group by Mary McCarthy