I was captivated by "The Group", Mary McCarthy's witty, unflinching and ultimately moving novel about the lives and loves of eight female Vassar graduates in 1930s Depression-era New York. McCarthy's prose is sharp as a switchblade and often as deadly - she has sympathy for her sweetly naive heroines, while never quite letting them off the hook for being cluelessly privileged. Though McCarthy said she despised feminism, "The Group" is undoubtedly a feminist classic: showing the tragedy of women of wealth, education and ambition struggling to live in a world that viewed them only as wives and mothers, and making an urgent case for the revolution to follow. It's also the funniest book I've read for quite some time. Highly recommended.

Very interesting, developed, characters you feel you know by the end of the book.

I loved this novel about a group of Vassar women in the 1930s. I will definitely reread it sometime.

I enjoyed this book - it was well written, with interesting characters who were well developed. While there was no real central plot - it was more a "slice of time" experience, and almost seemed like a precursor to today's trend of interconnected short stories - the story still moved along well. I particularly enjoyed reading about the different experiences of young women in this era of change.

This novel follows a group of 8 friends in the seven years after their college graduation. It took me a little while to get into because it was tricky to keep track of all of the characters and the minute details of their lives. The first chapter was especially overwhelming because you get thrown into a wedding scene and have to try to sort out who everyone is and how they relate to one another. The rest of the book seems to focus on primarily one character at a time, with the others popping in here and there for various life events.

The book was recommended as a good read alike for Rona Jaffe's "The Best of Everything," but it also reminded me of a 1930s version of "Girls in White Dresses" by Jennifer Close, as well as "Commencement" by J. Courtney Sullivan.

A mid-century classic. It was engrossing and something of an historical artifact. Keeping all the characters straight was something of a chore, but not enough to make the reading experience unpleasant. Structurally, this is more like linked stories than a novel--not much of an arc, and mostly what ties the stories together is the fact of the main characters all having been in the same residence hall tower at Vassar, graduating in 1933. At times the characters seemed amazingly modern in their views and behavior, and at other times hopelessly antiquated. This was the fun and surprise of the book.

I can’t believe I’d never heard of this! The plot follows Vassar’s ‘class of ‘33’ ( the ‘group’ as they navigate a world in which university women are somewhat superfluous, some even wonder have they ‘crippled’ themselves with their education?
As they navigate friendships, men, work, family, sex and babies you see that in a way they have been set up to fail. The only job opportunities open for them are working in the big department stores, Saks, Macy’s etc. and if they have a higher ambition it must be realised through their husband’s careers and not their own. SPOILER- the only member of the group that seems to escape this fate is the cool, rich and remote ‘Lakey’ who it turns out has secretly been a lesbian and doesn’t have to do anything but travel the world and ‘live deliciously’ as Robert Eggers would put it. Even her economic equal ‘Pokey’ lives a life of quiet anonymity, having child after child out of the way in the country. Marriage as a means to ecsnomic survival, and escape from one’s parents was as evident in the 30s as it was in Jane Austen’s time, only Austen women were never given a University education that taught them that they could do anything, if only the world was different. A really good snapshot of the old world meeting the new, where the gendered boundaries of economics, sex, politics and education were in the middle of being re-drawn.

I’d had this book on my wishlist for ages. Set in the 1930s and written in the 1960s, it was billed as “The Sex and the City of its day”. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would highly recommend it.