SHARP:The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion

By Michelle Dean

Grove, 384 pp., $26

It is no faint praise to say that Michelle Dean’s “Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion’’ reminds me of the biography collections I loved as a child. Books with titles like “Great Women in History’’ and “Great Jewish Women’’ introduced me to historical figures I remember to this day: Byzantine empress Theodora, first woman doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, Statue of Liberty poet Emma Lazarus. These assemblages of brief portraits opened up past and future, background and possibility. It’s easy to imagine “Sharp’’ having a similar effect today, especially on the “young woman of a certain kind of ambition’’ Dean targets as her audience.

Sharp, the term, references both intelligence and the ability to cut: to the chase, to the heart of the matter, deep into the arguments — and perhaps feelings — of others. “Sharp,’’ the book, compiles the biographies of and traces the relationships of a group of “sharp’’ 20th-century women writers, mostly American (except Rebecca West and, for the first part of her life, Hannah Arendt), mostly white (except an awkwardly token Zora Neale Hurston), mostly in New York and California, mostly journalists and critics, all possessed of “exceptional talent’’ and “the ability to write unforgettably,’’ and thus, Dean posits, with a soupçon of apolitical hyberbole, “granted a kind of intellectual equality to men other women had no hope of.’’

Moving chronologically through the last century, the book’s brief chapters tell the stories of individuals, friendships, rivalries, and connections both tenuous (Dorothy Parker left her estate to the NAACP, and Arendt wrote a wrongheaded essay against desegregation) and intriguing (Arendt’s Eichmann in “Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’’ and Mary McCarthy’s hit novel, “The Group,’’ appeared in 1963 — the same year as “The Feminine Mystique,’’ which is mentioned only in a single aside about Nora Ephron’s publisher at the New York Post). Parents, husbands, lovers, and children appear, but except where they are also intellectual soulmates or sparring partners, remain largely subsidiary to writing, culture, and ideas.

Sharp’s subjects start out doing theater, book, and film reviews (Dean won the National Book Critics Circle’s 2016 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and her persistent focus on reviews, both written and received, suggests a history of reviewing trying to claw its way out of these pages). They move on to journalism and essays for the likes of Vanity Fair, Vogue, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books. Needing money, they write fashion articles and film scripts. Many (West, McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Ephron, Renata Adler) write novels. Many publish books that have a significant impact on political philosophy (Arendt), film (Pauline Kael), cultural criticism (Sontag), psychoanalysis (Janet Malcolm), journalism (Didion, Malcolm), feminism (Ephron), and more.

They make enemies and friends, of each other and others; their reputations and relationships wax and wane; and, pretty much whatever they do, they make men angry that they are doing it. Yet, resolutely iconoclastic as individuals, despite their similarities, they maintain a distinct “ambivalence’’ about feminism and have “little time for notions of ‘sisterhood.’ ’’

Dean has a gift for summarizing eras, issues, texts, and relationships, from Martin Heidegger’s Nazi period, West’s psychoanalysis of Yugoslavia, and Arendt’s influential account of totalitarianism, to the evolution of The New Yorker and Partisan Review, Ephron’s career at the Post, and Malcolm’s furniture columns. However, she often lets her observations and the connections she uncovers go relatively unexamined. What does she make, for instance, of the fact that so many of these women were involved with powerful older men (West and H.G. Wells, Arendt and Heidegger, McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, Sontag and Philip Rieff) — and eventually left them? Why did their nearly universal appearance of confidence overlay such deep insecurities? Did their general shift in emphasis, over the course of the 1960s, from literature, the arts, communism, and fascism to “camp’’ (Sontag), “trash’’ (Kael), film, and feminism reflect changing cultural mores and the shifting interests of the American thinkerati, or register the effects of their own intellectual exertions? And, most importantly, was their sharpness a condition, cause, or consequence of their success?

Dean undertakes two tasks in “Sharp.’’ The first is narrative: to tell the history of these women, and in so doing underscore their “crucial’’ role in “[t]he forward march of American literature.’’ But while she claims that their lives and careers make it “puzzling . . . that anyone could look at the literary and intellectual history of the twentieth century and not center women in it’’ their successes were so often facilitated by male editors, mentors, colleagues, and even rivals as to suggest less an alternative history than a more thorough and well-rounded history, a major accomplishment nevertheless.

The second task, however, is analytic: to “ask . . . what made these women who they were, such elegant arguers, both hindered and helped by men, prone to but not defined by mistakes, and above all completely unforgettable,’’ a question she never quite answers, despite amply describing its elements.

SHARP:

The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion

By Michelle Dean

Grove, 384 pp., $26

Rebecca Steinitz is the author of “Time, Space, and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century British Diary.’’