BFF, as any parent of girls knows, stands for Best Friends Forever, and a popular theme of novels by and about women is the interweaving of the lives of two, three, four or more female friends. The girls or women can be single, married, divorced or widowed, mothers or not, young or middle-aged, in the workforce or outside it. What marks these novels out is that the relationships between the females, whether they involve support or betrayal, are more significant and decisive than the women’s relationships with males. There is a long tradition of such books, going back to the nineteenth century, and just off the top of my head I think of Jessie Innes-Browne’s Three Daughters of the United Kingdom (1897) and school stories by Angela Brazil, Elsie J.Oxenham, Elinor M.Brent-Dyer, Enid Blyton and many others which explore the endlessly fascinating world of female friendship, support and betrayal. Leaping to the 1970s and 80s a few examples are Shirley Conran’s Lace, Fay Weldon’s Female Friends and Maeve Binchy’s Light A Penny Candle.(I’ll write about some of these books again and other ones too.) Books like this have always attracted me. Two of my favourites are Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. I re-read both of them every decade or so, for the sheer joy of it.
The Group was first published in part in 1954, but not on this side of the Atlantic until 1963, which is usually given as its publication date. Its central characters are eight WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) graduates of Vassar College, a prestigious, pioneering women’s university in upstate New York. The 1930s are still ‘early days’ for female graduates, and all eight women feel special, dipping their toes into the world with tentative delight, prepared to try anything in work or in marriage, yes, even a Jew,(‘ though Mother gently laughed.’)The book begins with the unconventional wedding of Kay, the most headstrong and emotionally dim of them, in 1933, and it closes with her funeral in the early days of the Second World War. That isn’t really a spoiler, because McCarthy sets it up from the start that poor Kay is doomed in one way or another. The other members are Lakey, Priss, Polly, Libby, Pokey, Dottie, and Helena. Priss, Dottie, Polly (and Kay) are heart-breakingly sincere and idealistic about husbands, lovers, friends and even, about their ability to bring about important change in their small circles and in the world in general. They are the ones I can imagine being friends with. Lakey, more cynical and knowing, always does her own thing anyway, and has a moneyed background to give her confidence. (All the eight are from upper-middle-class backgrounds but most have to earn their living.)Libby is ‘literary’, though she has nothing original to say and is manipulative and insincere. Pokey, from the cream of New York society, is not really explored at all, but Helena, the indulged-but-not- spoiled only child of elderly mid-west parents, is the observer and chorus. The book is told through the voice of whichever character is being focused on at that time, and most of the dialogue is presented inside paragraphs instead of being marked off in paragraphs, which gives the entire book the slightly breathless feeling of reportage rather than straight fiction. Characters are explained through what they say and do; the over-enthusiastic description of Kay and Harald’s strange wedding in the beginning is the Group’s collective voice at that stage. Later that voice splinters into individual voices, though we never really get inside the heads of either Lakey or Pokey. The character McCarthy loves best is Polly, who, by following her feelings instead of the steely eugenicism and social determinism instilled in her at Vassar, finds true happiness. Another favourite is odd little Helena, the only one with the courage to confront the lying and cheating pseudo-socialist Norine.
There are interesting domestic details: Polly, living in a flat, washes out her underwear and blouses on a Sunday evening; Dottie,who feels the cold, wears furs and camelhair coats that make her look older than she is. Lakey and her European partner give Polly’s baby a present of embroidered little smocked dresses; Priss despairs of ever being as natural a mother as the nasty Norine, who ‘wears’ her baby in a sling and breastfeeds with hardly any effort. The most telling detail about the greedy, privileged Pokey – the only detail really – is that she gets a Baked Alaska stain down the front of the Lanvin suit she wears to Kay’s wedding. The Group think Baked Alaska is traditional, child’s party fare – it was really avant-garde (‘Baked Alaska, yes Alaska ‘- went the murmur up and down the tables) when I had it for my wedding reception in Ireland in 1986.
The Best of Everything was first published in 1958. This tells the story of four- well, really, five – women who make their lives in New York from 1952. All five work (at one stage or another) for the Fabian Publishing Company in New York, which is one of those big publishing houses that brings out magazines as well as popular novels (it reminded me of the firm parodied in the 1942 William Wyler film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, starring Danny Kaye.) Caroline, a graduate of Radcliffe, gets a job as a secretary and works her way up to reader/editor. April, from Colorado, is a typist, starry-eyed about New York life, Barbara is secretary to a magazine beauty editor and eventually gets her own byline, and Mary Agnes is a typist. Gregg is an actress who temps for a while at the company and gets to know the others that way, moving into a flat with Caroline. All of them are looking for love, except for Mary Agnes, who has already found it, but meanwhile they have lots of interesting experiences. What is really fascinating about this book are the details about working life in New York; Caroline’s only ‘role model’ for reader/editor, is the nasty Miss Farrow who tries to keep her down. Yes, it is depressing to see women putting women down but it happens, sometimes. But Barbara, who starts out as secretary to the magazine’s beauty editor, graduates to her own column and her own office and secretary by the age of 24 – that kind of elevation could happen too. (Think of the entirely female world of Quality magazine in the film Funny Face from this decade; I know it’s a comedy but it reflected reality, not least in the terrifying editor played by Kay Thompson.) There are also small details like the way the morning cup of coffee is served in jars – it isn’t quite explained how this works out – and the layout of small apartments – the Murphy bed that folds up against the wall. Thursday night restaurants are full because it is ‘the maids’ night out’ – even in 1950s New York.
Love is difficult for four of the five women. Caroline, recovering from a broken engagement, has a succession of passable male escorts, some disturbing, some boring, some quite nice. April falls spectacularly for Mr Wrong (not a spoiler – we know he is a wrong ‘un from the minute we meet him). Gregg loses her heart to a brilliant playwright who does not love her back, and Barbara, a divorced mother supporting both her own mother and her child, kisses a lot of toads before she meets Prince Charming. Only Mary Agnes follows the traditional route of engagement, marriage, retirement, reproduction and domesticity, and is quite conventionally content. Are we supposed to sneer at her? When I was young I thought so, but later readings show me that Jaffe was portraying a believable, conventional woman as a foil to the other four.
Sexual harassment in the workplace is taken for granted; at the Christmas function, Barbara has to put up with being kissed and mauled by one of the bosses; when she veers away from his second kiss, he shouts at her, and she is the one embarrassed by this. Trying to avoid being groped by male bosses is part of Caroline’s working day. Even outside the office, a particularly insulting kind of sexism rules all male-female encounters. A perfectly nice man can say things like ‘I like the way you argue’ to a woman. Women simper and say thank you when men disbelieve that they – the women – were good students at college ‘because you are far too pretty.’ Nora Ephron, who worked in New York in the early 1960s, liked and loathed this novel because for her ‘it caught perfectly the awful essence of being a single woman in a big city….the story seemed to me only barely exaggerated from what I was seeing all around me and…doing myself.’
As in The Group, there is plenty of detail about clothes and appearances. When April comes to New York first, she wears a baby-blue gaberdine suit and has long, corn-coloured hair down her back. She cuts her hair and smartens up; at a wedding she wears a ‘pale gray linen dress and a gondolier hat with grey, yellow and white ribbons around it’. Caroline wears black suits for the office and little black dresses when she goes out. Gregg, the most unconventional of them all, wears the alternative 1950s uniform of narrow skirts, short straight hair and androgynous coats. The book is daring, for its time – extra-marital sex is not always deplored, there is an abortion, and at least one of the characters opts for an interesting single working life over marriage.
I first readThe Best of Everything as a student (around 1979), a second-hand copy, (needless to say it wasn’t on the course) and I lent it to my 20-something daughter recently. She read it avidly; appalled at the sexism, she was quite envious of the fun they all had. Her generation has more freedom, but not as much fun, it seems.
( There was a brief flurry of renewed interest in this book when Mad Men hit our TV screens some years ago. I never caught the Mad Men bug, oddly.)
I first picked upThe Group around the same time, and could not believe that McCarthy was writing about the 1930s. For us female university students in the late 1970s, freedom started in college because we all lived in flats, whereas for the Group it began after graduation because they lived in halls of residence in college.As young women going to university in late-1970s Ireland we felt as privileged and path-finding and about as free, (which is to say, free only up to a point) as young female graduates in America in the 1930s. And like them, we felt a strong obligation to make a difference in the world.
Rona Jaffe, The Best of Everything (N.Y: Simon & Schuster 1958)
Mary McCarthy, The Group (N.Y. 1954? London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson 1963)
Nora Ephron, ‘The Girls in the Office’ in Crazy Salad (NY: Bantam 1975).
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CLEAR CLASSIC BOOKS: a few words.
I’m Caitriona Clear, and I’ve been addicted to reading since my first trip to Roscrea Library in 1964. In this blog I’ll be sharing my thoughts about books old and new (mostly old) but occasionally referring to recent books I’ve enjoyed too.
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RECENT READS.
Delighted to see, in a bookshop recently, both Orla Mackey’s Mouthing (Hamish Hamilton) and Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown (Weidenfield & Nicolson) in bright new editions piled high. These were two of my favourite reads from 2024. Mouthing is about a cast of characters in a rural Kilkenny village from the 1960s to the present day, and in its humanity, humour and unexpected storylines and outcomes, reminds me of Maura Laverty’s Never No More (London: Longmans, Green 1942) also set in a Leinster village, but in the 1920s. Breakdown is about what happens when a middle-aged woman suddenly refuses to play the game of pretending she’s happy, and leaves without warning, deserting her entitled children and smug husband for a life that isn’t perfect, but isn’t pretending to be, either. Both books are so beguilingly written you’ll be sorry to finish them.
Clear Classic Books 
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