'The Group': A 'lady book' full of brutal truths

In a recent Boston Review article, The Novelists and the Warmongers, Andrew Holter analyses the legacy of Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam War reporting, which “proved some of the most controversial American journalism to emerge from the war”. Holter contends that McCarthy’s work was controversial not because she was exposing “one of the many war crimes perpetrated by US forces” but because “her reporting depicted the war as something perhaps even more painful for many Americans to confront: a psychodrama of vanity and hubris that indicted the values of the ‘Greatest Generation’ to which she belonged.”

Controversy was nothing new to McCarthy — four year before her Vietnam reportage, the book that would cement her legacy as a trailblazer, a no-holds-barred fictionalised account of her fellow Vassar graduates set in the 1930s, The Group, had been published, garnering notoriety for its frank depiction of sex and birth control and pregnancy, acclaim for the same reasons, sneering reviews by the likes of Norman Mailer, criticism from her classmates, and great commercial success. It was also banned in multiple countries.

That was more than six decades ago. Surely, The Group (a “lady-book” as Mailer called it) doesn’t have the power to shock in the age of the internet? Turns out, it can be discomfiting to read a forensic account of a young woman’s first sexual encounter even in 2026, not because the author is indulging in voyeurism, but because in McCarthy’s narrative, the power imbalances, the unfairness, the pain and shame are shown without any attempts to sugarcoat the brutal truth. The woman in question — Dorothy “Dottie” Renfrew — is introduced to us in the first pages of The Group as “a devout Episcopal communicant” attending the wedding of her Vassar roommate Kay Strong in New York in June, 1933.

At the wedding, which is also attended by six other Vassar grads whose stories are told through the course of the novel, Dottie meets the alcoholic divorced painter, Dick Brown and in keeping with the rest of her group’s thinking, that “The worst fate…would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened”, has the aforementioned encounter with Brown in an “attic room that smelled of cooking fat”. Dottie later visits a doctor to get a contraceptive device on Brown’s recommendation, and after being stood up by him, leaves the city.

After that shock of an opener, McCarthy’s perspective on the lives of these women comes sharply into focus: that of women from upper and middle classes who are given the best possible liberal college education and yet expected to do nothing more than play second fiddle to men and pursue empty materialistic lives generously doused in alcohol and regrets. McCarthy spares nothing, not even the debate between bottle- and breast-feeding babies — as depicted in the tragicomic experience of Priss Crockett who gives birth to her first child at New York Hospital where, “She would have been more comfortable in the short cotton hospital nightshirt that tied in the back but the floor nurses every morning made her struggle into a satin-and-lace ‘nightie’ from her trousseau. Doctor’s orders, they said.”

Not all her characters are damned to sad marriages and couplings — Polly Andrews has a low-paying job as a technician in Cornell Medical Center. Her family has lost their money, and she’s briefly entangled with a vacillating intellectual, but she knows how to make do with less compared to her peers and marries a doctor who seems sensible. The other character, who’s briefly glimpsed and often mentioned, the wealthy Elinor “Lakey” Eastlake, moves to Europe, where she lives with greater freedom with various female lovers. The Group ends just as the Second World War breaks out, and the friends gather for a funeral of one of their own.

The era McCarthy depicts in The Group may be long past, but its concerns, the hypocrisies of class and gender, sexual politics and violence, the pursuit of materialism, and the clash between leftist and conservative political movements (sadly) don’t seem dated at all.

That One Book is a monthly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at  saudha.substack.com