Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Mary McCarthy
-
Standard Name: McCarthy, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Therese McCarthy
Married Name: Johnsrud
Married Name: Wilson
Married Name: Broadwater
Married Name: West
United States novelist MMC
began publishing her critical essays and novels in the late nineteen thirties. She is best known for her novel The Group, 1963 (about the relations among a group of young women recently graduated from university into the modern world) and for autobiography and trenchant political commentary. Her works also include travel writing and art history, as well as short and full-length fiction.
MD
has recalled how her father, newly demobbed after his wartime army service, patiently taught me to read from a primer called The Radiant Way. Later, Mary McCarthy
's The Group and Doris Lessing
Friends, Associates
Caroline Blackwood
CB
's first marriage was a period of intense socializing. She knew virtually everyone in bohemian as well as in fashionable London circles. The painter Francis Bacon
, a close friend of her husband's, became...
Friends, Associates
Hannah Arendt
HA
's journalistic and editorial work meant that she met almost everyone who belonged to the intellectual scene in New York, as well as those just passing through, like T. S. Eliot
. Those who...
Intertextuality and Influence
Germaine Greer
In Bed with the English, which takes the form of a letter, declares its literary allegiances to be Anglo-American. It hopes to provide a straight-talking [Mary] McCarthy
-[Brigid] Brophy
rundown on the English...
Literary responses
Jan Morris
The Times Literary Supplement review opened by taking exception to Morris's claim that the flood of books about Venice had, by this period, dried to a trickle; but it accepted Morris's view that the best...
Literary responses
Christina Stead
This was, says Hazel Rowley
, one of those highly original novels that do not take off at first.
Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead: A Biography. Secker and Warburg.
270
Whatever the artistic consequences of its national transposition of setting, some US critics found the...
Literary responses
Fay Weldon
FW
tried this too, before publication, on Louis Simpson
. He suggested it was a rip-off of Mary McCarthy
's The Group, and said that introducing eight characters on the first page was too...
Literary responses
Margaret Atwood
MA
won her second Governor-General's Medal for this novel.
Bibliographer John Meier
's collection of Governor-General's-winning novels includes a copy of The Handmaid's Tale inscribed from Atwood (Peggy A.) to Gwendolyn MacEwen
...
Publishing
Sybille Bedford
She had already contributed an article on him to a volume edited by Julian Huxley
in 1965: Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963. A Memorial Volume. She later referred to her work on the biography as a...
Reception
Beryl Bainbridge
Reviews were excellent, but BB
was astonished when they treated this as a funny book.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(4 November 1978): 14
Karl Miller
, a steady admirer of her writing, hoped Bainbridge would get the Booker Prize...
Reception
Iris Murdoch
This book was runner-up for the Booker Prize, by a whisker and a casting vote. The winner was The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell
. The judges were Edna O'Brien
and Mary McCarthy
Residence
Elizabeth Bishop
EB
's first home of her own after graduation was a little apartment at 16 Charles Street, Manhattan, found for her by Mary McCarthy
.
Marshall, Megan. Elizabeth Bishop. A Miracle for Breakfast. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
49
Textual Production
Hannah Arendt
Mary McCarthy
, HA
's literary executor, edited and published a handsome boxed set
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Yale University Press.
470
containing the first two volumes of The Life of the Mind, the final, uncompleted work in which Arendt returned to philosophy.
“Men in Dark Times by Hannah Arendt”. Kirkus Reviews.
Kirkus Reviews
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Yale University Press.
xlviii
Textual Production
Hannah Arendt
HA
's papers are mostly held by the Library of Congress
, with thought books which gathered material for published works, and some correspondence, at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv
at Marburg in Germany.
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World. Yale University Press.
xlvii, xlviii
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Muriel Jaeger
This book is sometimes called a memoir, but its autobiographical moments are only incidental. MJ
's attention is mostly directed towards books and reading; her own experiences of writing, publishing, and having her works performed...
Timeline
1962: Publisher John Calder and writer's widow...
Writing climate item
1962
Publisher John Calder
and writer's widow Sonia Orwell
together organised at Edinburgh the first, highly successful Writers' Conference.
February 1963: The New York Review of Books began publication,...
By late 1963: The best-known novel by US author Mary McCarthy,...
Writing climate item
By late 1963
The best-known novel by US author Mary McCarthy
, The Group, appeared in Britain. It traces the later lives of a number of graduates of Vassar
, then an all-women's college.
12 February 1980: US poet Muriel Rukeyser died in Greenwich...
Writing climate item
12 February 1980
US poet Muriel Rukeyser
died in Greenwich Village, New York, two years after publishing her Collected Poems and four years after her last new collection, The Gates, 1976.
16 October 2012: The American Library in Paris held a ceremony...
Writing climate item
16 October 2012
The American Library in Paris
held a ceremony with speeches and an exhibition to commemorate the writer Mary McCarthy
, who died in 1989 but whose one hundredth birthday fell this year. Her alma mater,...
Texts
McCarthy, Mary. A Charmed Life: A Novel. Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1955.
McCarthy, Mary. Cannibals and Missionaries. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.
