Last week, we studied Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) on an M.A. module entitled The Literature of Cold War America. McCarthy (1912-1989) died thirty years ago this October. She was one of the most important American intellectuals of her generation but is relatively understudied and taught. My colleague, Dr. Ellen McWilliams, is working on McCarthy and will discuss her in her forthcoming book, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities. You can read some of Dr. McWilliams’s work on McCarthy in this January 2017 piece that appeared in the Irish Times.
For the Cold War module, McCarthy is a very interesting writer to study because she had been a “fellow traveler” in Communist circles in the 1930s. However, after the Moscow Trials and the treatment of Leon Trotsky, she severed her connections to Communism and became an anti-Stalinist liberal. She wrote about her flirtation with, and subsequent disaffection from, Communism in an article for Encounter magazine in 1954.
I also find McCarthy interesting because she’s an alumna of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, with which Exeter’s Department of English and Film has longstanding teaching and student exchanges. Most years, a staff member from English and Film goes there to teach for a semester and a colleague from Vassar’s English department comes to Exeter in exchange. I’ve been lucky enough to go there twice, from January to June 2012 and January to June 2017. In 2017, I arrived four days before the Trump inauguration!
Over the years, many students on our English with Study in North America degree have also studied at Vassar for a full academic year.
McCarthy graduated from Vassar in 1933, when it was still a women’s college (it became co-ed in 1969). Her immediate post-graduation years were thinly fictionalised in her marvelous tell-all novel, The Group (1963). Her papers are housed in the special collections at Vassar’s stunning library. Here’s me, looking very cold outside said library, in February 2017.
And this is the entrance to Vassar, looking decidedly less wintry, in June 2017.
