Some of the lives make more of an impression, particularly Kay and her husband Harald. I was interested to learn elsewhere that Mary McCarthy was a short-story writer as the book is like a series of intersecting short-stories as each woman’s life is described. Some have called it a feminist book and I can see that in describing women’s discontent over the imbalances of ‘power’ in marriage, their disappointments over what life had to offer and the attitudes of some of the male characters could be seen as a polemical, but mostly I think it’s just a book that would appeal more to women than men. But once the book got into its stride I became engrossed in the women’s lives. As other reviewers have mentioned one has to concentrate, particularly in the earlier part of the book, as so many characters are introduced by name and nickname. The predominance, until relatively recently, of psychoanalysis in American psychiatry is strongly evident and the parts about characters undergoing this treatment were the only boring parts of the book for me. There’s quite a bit about what women expected of life and the social conventions and child-rearing fashions of the era. I think it would have had more of an impression on me when I was young. Some of the frankness, particularly over women’s sexual feelings and experiences, were regarded as risqué when the book came out in the 60s but it now seems matter-of-fact. Though the stories are about a group of women graduates from Vasser College in the 1930s the influence of the1960s, when the book was written, shine through. Once a trail-blazer, but now seems less so
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