“It would not even be amusing to rape you,” he says, glaring down at her ruined dress.

He stops only when he discovers she’s a virgin. Nils, Libby’s charming Norwegian suitor, turns violent when they are left alone in her apartment. Marry a publisher, Miss MacAusland, and be his hostess.” There is an inverse correlation at play: the nicer a man appears, the greater his cruelty behind closed doors. “Publishing’s a man’s business,” her editor informs her, “unless you marry into it. Meanwhile, Libby is fired from her publishing job, even though she has done her work with exceptional diligence and passion. Another doctor advises her to buy black chiffon underwear and cheap perfume, so that her husband will start thinking of her as a whore. When Norine consults doctors about her husband’s problem, she is told that she should consider herself lucky that her husband is unable to have intercourse, and that, besides, sex isn’t necessary for a woman. The men in The Group behave with glibness, condescension, and even brutality toward the Vassar grads. McCarthy’s candid accounts of female sexuality are accompanied by unsettlingly honest portraits of male cruelty.

“Supposing Put were to spend five minutes a week with a whore-the time it takes him to shave? Why should I mind?” We also learn about the sensitivity of a new mother’s nipples the proper way to emplace a diaphragm and the secret fear, and resentment, that young mothers harbor toward their own children. Norine wonders whether it might make things easier if she allowed her husband this one indiscretion. Norine is having an affair with her friend’s husband, in part because her own husband can manage erections only with prostitutes. Libby, the ambitious English major, has a little secret: “she sometimes made love to herself, on the bath mat, after having her tub,” achieving a state that she names “Over the Top.” Dottie Renfrew has a secret too: she has been deflowered by a callous lothario named Dick Brown during which, to her astonishment, she went Over the Top herself. The novel follows nine Vassar girls, class of ’33, through their 20s and into their bathrooms, bedrooms, and the bedrooms of their friends’ husbands.

American readers were scandalized by The Group when it was published in 1963 for quite different reasons, The Group also scandalized Mary McCarthy’s critics-many of whom happened to be her friends, rivals, and lovers.

The group book mary mccarthy