In 1963, Mary McCarthy published The Group. A ranging social novel that follows eight female friends after their graduation from Vassar College in 1933, The Group was a smashing success, soaring to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and becoming, in the way few works of literary fiction are, a social phenomenon. Revolutionary for its attention to a sort of modern female interiority that was otherwise absent from popular fiction—characters discuss birth control, particularly the use of a diaphragm—The Group was, in the words of McCarthy herself, bereft of male consciousness. For young women, especially those grappling with unsatisfying marriages and unfulfilled professional ambitions, the novel was a touchstone, and it won, initially at least, rave reviews from literary critics. But among her own cohort—the left-leaning novelists, essayists, and critics who made up the New York Intellectuals—The Group was an embarrassment. Norman Podhoretz, the young editor of Commentary and not yet an avowed neoconservative, savaged the novel in strikingly personal terms, dismissing McCarthy as an “intellectual on the surface, a furniture-describer at heart.” She was, to Podhoretz, no more than one more member of the “tribe of contemporary lady novelists.” Norman Mailer, in his own review, went even further—McCarthy, he charged, had “failed and even failed miserably to do more than write the best novel the editors of the women’s magazines ever conceived in their secret ambitions.” Her reputation, he fumed, was overstated because she had never been able to “get tough enough to go with the boys.” The literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, one of McCarthy’s closest friends, was no kinder. Writing under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne, Hardwick produced a short, scathing parody of The Group in the New York Review of Books. mocking a scene in the novel in which one of the characters loses her virginity.
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