All their wits about them

From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to announce their singularity; to be, as Mary Wollstonecraft announced, ‘the first of a new genus’. Each of the women in Michelle Dean’s survey of mostly American essayists, reviewers and novelists had to defend her right to debate, critique and observe. The lives of Sontag, Arendt, Parker, West, Didion, Ephron and others are woven into a thick braid running the length of the 20th century and into ours.

It’s not quite a group biography, but more a study of how their lives and work dovetailed with each other and with the major political and cultural movements of the era. Dean begins with Dorothy Parker, poet, short story writer, acidic reviewer and queen of the Algonquin Round Table (Dean demythologises this, as indeed did Parker herself). As befits a trailblazer, she cuts an isolated figure here, inspiring the rest but not otherwise linked with them. The young Rebecca West called her ‘a sublime artist’, which takes us to Dean’s second chapter — a survey of West’s work. In the sole excursion to a writer of colour, her third compares West’s coverage of a lynching trial in South Carolina un-favourably with Zora Neale Hurston’s handling of the same material. As Dean admits in her foreword, her subjects ‘came from similar backgrounds: white, often Jewish, and middle-class’. Hurston’s work is just as significant as theirs, but ‘racism kept her writings at the margin’.

With the arrival of Hannah Arendt, the braiding device becomes more secure. Arendt became friends with the novelist Mary McCarthy and provided a publicity puff for a new young writer, Susan Sontag, then a debut novelist but soon to become a heavyweight cultural commentator.