The Group by Mary McCarthy

Eight young women graduate from Vassar, a respected single- sex liberal arts college in New York in 1933 (as the author Mary McCarthy did). The group of friends embark on very different lives while still remaining in touch with each other and in some respects intertwined with each other.

The women are highly educated, from affluent and not so affluent backgrounds, and with more independence and autonomy than a lot of women at the time, but with issues familiar to modern women to deal with.

None of us particularly liked any of the eight young women who make up the group at the heart of this influential novel written in 1963. But members were interested in the social and political issues that are raised in the book - including contraception, sexism in the workplace, sexual abuse, promiscuity, fidelity, emotional and financial dependance, mental illness, psychoanalysis, child rearing theories, fads, work vs domesticity, and Roosevelt's New Deal vs communism and Trotskyism. Some of us were surprised at what the book showed us these women experienced as long ago as the 1930s and were intrigued that the book was banned in Australia because of the moral issues raised in it.

We decided that most of the issues the women were dealing with remain with us and are discussed publicly and privately today. Some of us were surprised that abortion is one subject that is not included - but perhaps that was a step too far for the time.

We liked McCarthy's incisive writing style and the matter-of- factness and apparent veracity of the descriptions of the lives of the women. This is not a feminist book since none of the women have this consciousness (and although McCarthy was a political activist she said publicly she was not a feminist). Yet at the time of its publication, of course, these issues were starting to be raised vehemently by other writers.

The book is thought provoking. We had a long conversation about school friends, social hierarchies and pecking orders, what money had to do with how things worked out, and whether education and access to a career made a difference. We were interested that the book influenced the writer, Candace Bushnell, to write a series of modern essays in 1997 which became the TV series Sex and the City. (As we all admitted that we had not watched the TV program, homework was set to have a look at an episode to contrast and compare the book.)

Who was Mary McCarthy?

Mary McCarthy was an American novelist and critic who was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1912.

At age 6, she lost both her parents to the Spanish flu, and she and her three brothers were raised by an uncle and aunt who, McCarthy said later, physically abused them daily. She graduated in 1933 from Vassar College in New York with a liberal arts degree and built a literary reputation as a writer, and a satirist and critic on a number of newspapers and publications.

With one side of the family Catholic and the other Jewish, Mary rebelled and became an atheist and a communist (favouring Trotsky) as a young woman. However, during the 1940s and 50s she became well known as a critic of both McCarthyism and Communism. She later opposed the Vietnam War and openly supported the Viet Cong in her writing.

She was married four times, including to playwright Harald Johnsrud, whose first name is the same as the husband of one of the characters in The Group. Like this character, McCarthy was committed for a time to a mental institution for "hysteria" by her husband. McCarthy's friends from Vassar also complained that she included them in the book but McCarthy argued that each character was a composite of people she knew.

McCarthy's first book was The Company She Keeps which was also semi-autobiographical and published to critical acclaim in 1942.

However The Group was her most successful book and remained on the New York Times' best seller list for two years. She published numerous other books and essays and received several prestigious awards and honours in the United States. She died in 1989.