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

by Michelle Dean

A “deeply researched and uncommonly engrossing” book profiling ten trailblazing literary women, including Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion (Paris Review).In Sharp, Michelle Dean explores the lives of ten women of vastly different backgrounds and points of view who all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America. These women—Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—are united by what Dean calls “sharpness,” the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit.Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing despite the extreme condescension of the male-dominated cultural establishment.Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Biography, History, Womens, Essays, Audiobook

384 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 10, 2018

About the author

Michelle Dean is a Canadian journalist and critic. She currently lives and works in the United States of America.

Dean was honored in 2016 with the National Book Critics' Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and Elle. Her first book, Sharp: The Women Who Made An Art of Having An Opinion, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2018.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mary McCarthy saw Susan Sontag at a party, where else, and said to her

“I hear you’re the new me.”

****

This account of the careers of Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm with walk-on parts for Rebecca West and Zora Neale Hurston was kinda interesting and I must also confess kinda just a little bit boring too.

I have read biographies of three of them already and am a big fan of Janet Malcolm already but the others are mostly just names. Like, I know that Joan Didion wrote The White Album but I have no idea what she thought of Rocky Raccoon.

Big points go to Michelle Dean for wrangling a vast amount of information and squishing it all down into 300 pages but this means that some of it is a breathless dash.

I must take some of those points back, though, for a dull pedestrian no-style of writing, and also for some real clunkers which have you rereading in bafflement :

To the extent it reflected her own experiences, she was clearly standing outside them, evaluating them and evaluating herself, and then fictionalising events according to the judgements she made.

Er, does that actually mean anything?

And because a lot of these women had very similar zigzag careers in journalism & then writing novels & living in New York & having bad marriages & becoming alcoholic & so forth it got a bit samey, to tell you the truth, sometimes it seemed to be about one person with ten heads rather than ten people with one head each.

Like, they all wrote for lotsa magazines and newspapapers, which sounded completely interchangeable to me. No doubt the editors of the said rags would have shot me dead on the spot if I said such a thing back then, but the New York Review of Books sounds a lot like the New York Book Review to me, and Esquire and Vanity Fair and the New Yorker were all the same thing weren’t they and if they weren’t, no one cares anymore. But throughout this book it’s a big deal getting fired from this magazine and hired by that one. Those pages, and they are not infrequent, are a yawwwwwwwwwwwn.

( NB - Hannah Arendt was nothing like the rest of them. She wrote enormous tomes like The Origins of Totalitarianism and why she is in this book alongside Pauline Kael who wrote Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a head scratcher; it’s like inviting Mother Theresa to an all-night poker party; but it’s true the others knew of her and kind of worshipped her from afar.)

Michelle Dean’s main point here, I think, and it’s an uneasy one, is that these intellectual women who were fierce and original and successful had only the most reluctant relationship with feminism, at the very time when it had come back ragingly. Hannah Arendt for one seems to have hated the very word. Eventually some of the others coughed to being feminist but only in latter years. They were conflicted.

I wanted to know exactly why in each case but I think that would have expanded the book to 400 pages. It was complicated, as they say.

The jacket designer by the way should stand in the corner with the dunce’s cap on for the sheer dopiness of including seven photos of these writers without identifying who is who.

And any way, come on, a few photos inside the book too wouldn’t have killed you, Little Brown Book Group trading as Fleet, you mean people! Your budget wouldn't stretch that far? That's not because they're women writers by any chance?

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a disappointment.

This is a book about women who built careers on criticism, yet does very little to really, truly delve into the minefield of what it means to be a person whose very existence is “critical” (Living While Female) while turning the mirror around on the societies that deemed them critical in the first place. The writing is light and easy to absorb, and the women discussed are interesting figures, which makes it all the more impressive that I was in no way *excited* about this book. It honestly just felt like a collection of Wikipedia articles written by a Women’s Studies undergrad. And while I understand the reasoning for the an absence of racial diversity (you can’t talk about WOC critics if society didn’t allow them to exist), half a chapter on Zora Neale Hurston—presented in the context of a white woman—is not enough. Either include a chapter criticizing Criticism (and don’t hide it in the introduction, that’s cheap and cowardly), or expand the concept of your book to be about critical women, even if they weren’t capital-C Critics, in order to represent multiple voices. As it stands, this book just feels like one more piece of self-congratulatory White Girl feminist history.

For a book about criticism, “Sharp” feels uncomfortably dull and blunt. Such a wasted opportunity.

[Tess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gobbled this book up in a few sittings. Loved reading more about women I already admired, and learning a lot about a few I didn't know much about. A beautifully written and well researched book.

[Nick Imrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wrote this book because this history has never been as well-known as it deserves to be, at least outside certain isolated precincts of New York. Biographies had been written of all of them and devoured by me. But as biographies do, each book considered these women in isolation, a phenomenon unto herself, missing the connections I felt I could see. The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists: the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds, the Roths and Bellows and Salingers. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering. Even in more academic accounts, in 'intellectual histories', it is generally assumed that men dominated the scene. Certainly, the so-called New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century are often identified as a male set. But my research showed otherwise. Men might have outnumbered women, demographically. But in the arguably more crucial matter of producing work worth remembering, the work that defined the terms of their scene, the women were right up to par - and often beyond it.

The title suggests a broader scope, but as the preface makes clear, Dean has chosen to select her subjects from a very small circle: 20th century women who wrote for a number of New York magazines with interchangeable names New York Review of Books, New Yorker, New York Book Review, Books Reviewed by New Yorkers etc. etc. etc.
They reviewed and were reviewed in turn, often attending the same parties, in what was a very small incestuous world. In one way, this leads to some strange differences between the women featured: Hannah Arendt was a great philosopher; Pauline Kael wrote movie reviews. Can they be meaningful united by sharpness? But in another way, unfortunately, it makes for about a dozen samey biographies: all these women were white, middle-class, mostly Jewish, often alcoholic, nervous or driven, frequently from broken families or in bad marriages, sharing the same self-conscious hunger for fame or intellectual influence as their male counter-parts.

Of course, one good reason to select all her subject from the same circle is to highlight the connections between them. Dean's aim to show that women were fully integrated members of the New York intelligensia is admirable - but perhaps not perfectly executed. With over a dozen biographies to get through, there isn't really space to explore the connections between all these women. This is a short, gossipy book: it's a great introduction if you don't know any of these writers, but it doesn't have the depth to cover all their relationships. In some places this is because the relationships just aren't there. Renata Adler may have had an opinion on Pauline Kael's style, but if they had any relationship beyond one bad review Dean doesn't mention it. At the other end of the scale, it turns out that Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy were great friends for much of their lives! This is wonderful, and I had no idea! But there just isn't space to go into depth, so we have to take Dean's word for it when she reassures us:

Many thought McCarthy wasn't a thinker on the level of her friend. But Arendt didn't find her friend's intellect so obviously minor. She sent McCarthy manuscripts to consider and edit, as well as to "English" and their letters are laced not only with gossip and household reports but with arguments about what constitutes fiction, about the reach of Fascism, about individual morality, and common sense.

This is so tantalising. I immediately wanted a whole book about McCarthy and Arendt, and a collection of their correspondence, and a much deeper analysis of their friendship than the scant few lines we get:

'Neither McCarthy nor Arendt would have accepted a definition of their friendship that took it as 'feminist'. They disliked other women in their set. They were eager to talk as women but would never have wanted to speak of their gender as a defining characteristic. Some of that had to do with the time they lived in. Some of it was the fact that neither fit in particularly well with anyone but the other. The bond between them was not built on a traditional sense of sisterhood. They were allies who often thought 'so much alike' as Arendt remarked at the outset of their friendship. And that common way of thinking simply thickened into armor they could jointly use, whenever the world seemed to be against them.'

Dean clearly considers herself a feminist, and her work in compiling this book a feminist act: preserving women's history and championing women's achievements. But none of these women considered themselves feminist. Like most ambitious outsiders, they were far too awkward and solitary to be enthusiastic about anything like 'sisterhood', and as iconoclasts and trail-blazers, they were mostly baffled at the idea that sexism could stop them. As intellectuals, they were constantly feuding with other intellectuals. And as critics they spared no-one, male or female. A woman harshly criticising another woman can look a lot like feminine bitchiness - Dean doesn't always a good job of highlighting that this is intellectual bitchiness and knows no gender!

And yet, at the other end of the scale, she gushes about how impressive it is that women were writing at all: They came up in a world that was not eager to hear women's opinions about anything. It can be easy to forget that Dorothy Parker began publishing her caustic verse before women even had the vote. Now, the vote is good for many things, but it is not necessary for writing. Indeed, writing is one of the few careers that has been acceptable for women for centuries, even if men aren't always happy about what they write.

Men are conspicuously absent in this book. On one hand, this is rather funny. Carl Bernstein features primarily as an adulterer. Norman Mailer is constantly blundering into disputes he doesn't understand, issuing stupid attention-seeking statements, and then blundering out again. It's an excellent illustration of how our perspective effects our judgements. Norman Mailer isn't the centre of attention here, so we only see his reactions, not his actions, and he seems marginal. I wonder how many women in history seem marginal to us because we only ever encounter them as secondary figures in books that centre men?
On the other hand, Dean fails in her aim to prove that these women defined their scene and produced great works at the same level as the men in their circle. This is not to say that they didn't, only that Dean never makes any comparison between the work of women and men, so no judgement can be made. Now I'd be the first person to throw Hemingway's entire oeuvre into the sea - but it would take a much bigger, deeper work than this one to show that the acknowledged great literature of the 20th century was not quite so great as the book, film, and theatre reviews that responded to it.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

(2.5) “People have trouble with women who aren’t ‘nice,’ … who have the courage to sometimes be wrong in public.” In compiling 10 mini-biographies of twentieth-century women writers and cultural critics who weren’t afraid to be unpopular, Dean (herself a literary critic) celebrates their feminist achievements and insists “even now … we still need more women like this.” Her subjects include Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron and Renata Adler. She draws on the women’s correspondence and published works as well as biographies to craft concise portraits of their personal and professional lives.

You’ll get the most out of this book if a) you know nothing about these women and experience this as a taster session; or b) you’re already interested in at least a few of them and are keen to learn more. I found the Dorothy Parker and Hannah Arendt chapters most interesting because, though I was familiar with their names, I knew very little about their lives or works. Parker’s writing was pulled from a slush pile in 1914 and she soon replaced P.G. Wodehouse as Vanity Fair’s drama critic. Her famous zingers masked her sadness over her dead parents and addict husband. “This was her gift,” Dean writes: “to shave complex emotions down to a witticism that hints at bitterness without wearing it on the surface.”

Unfortunately, such perceptive lines are few and far between, and the book as a whole lacks a thesis. Chance meetings between figures sometimes provide transitions, but the short linking chapters are oddly disruptive. In one, by arguing that Zora Neale Hurston would have done a better job covering a lynching than Rebecca West, Dean only draws attention to the homogeneity of her subjects: all white and middle-class; mostly Jewish New Yorkers. I knew too much about Sontag and Didion to find their chapters interesting, but enjoyed reading more about Ephron. I’ll keep the book to refer back to when I finally get around to reading Mary McCarthy. It has a terrific premise, but I found myself asking what the point was.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.

A recent trend in nonfiction revolves around anthologies of great women. Across ages and genres, notable women of the past are being highlighted in collections of their lives and works. When I saw the cover for SHARP, I knew immediately I wanted to read about its female writers and intellectuals, some familiar and others less familiar to me. I really enjoyed this book and its careful approach to these icons of the written word. I admired Dean's writing style and the way she approached each woman from both her triumphs and their flaws. The book wasn't afraid to criticize its subjects or to reveal perhaps less honorable elements of their work. The transitions between each chapter - linking each separate writer to the subject of the next chapter - was a clever and interesting way to see how all these icons were connected.
I learned a lot about women I already admired (Sontag, Didion, Ephron) and women who I now want to read more from (Parker, McCarthy, Kael). One criticism I have is that I wish each chapter included photos and/or letters of the writer.
I could totally see this becoming a series, with subsequent books highlighting women from other eras and/or featuring more diverse and lesser-known voices.

[Fátima Linhares · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trouxe este livro da biblioteca por achar o título curioso e falar de mulheres que, como diz na epígrafe, fizeram da opinião uma arte. Foi uma leitura interessante no sentido em que não conhecia nenhuma das senhoras mencionadas no livro, com a exceção de Joan Didion, que sei que escreveu O ano do pensamento mágico. As outras mulheres de língua afiada eram, para mim, totalmente desconhecidas. Assumo que seja pura ignorância minha, mas que agora ficou um pouco colmatada com esta leitura. Talvez esta falta de conhecimento tenha feito com que a leitura não fosse muito entusiasmante. Quem tiver conhecimento prévio destas personalidades, quer da sua vida privada, quer da sua carreira, poderá tirar mais proveito deste livro. O que é que eu fiquei a saber: que escreveram ensaios, crónicas, críticas literárias e/ou de cinema e algumas escreveram mesmo livros que ainda hoje são importantes como As origens do totalitarismo de Hannah Arendt e Black Lamb and Grey Falcon de Rebeca West. Todas escreveram para revistas como a New Yorker, New York Reviews Books, Partisan Review, entre outras, quase como uma panelinha, e todas num ou noutro momento das suas vidas se cruzaram e algumas até se tornaram amigas. No seu tempo foram mulheres com opiniões vincadas e com pensamentos sólidos e bem estruturados sobre o que as rodeava, algo que não era muito costumeiro, num mundo dominado por homens. Conseguiram afirmar-se e deixar um legado indiscutível durante a sua passagem por este planeta.

[Paulla Ferreira Pinto · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 *
Quem pensa que vai encontrar pequenas biografias de assumidas feministas, desengane-se.
São todas mulheres fortes a lutar por se imporem intelectualmente num mundo e num século hostil às mulheres mas que começa a não resistir à pressão feminina.
Não são simpáticas nem submissas e por vezes são mesmo desagradáveis. Rotularam-nas de impossíveis, de ter mau feitio, enfim, de possuírem uma língua afiada. Quem as rotulou?! Pergunta cuja resposta não precisa de ser declarada.
Se se justificava o comportamento excessivo de algumas, mesmo antipático? O contexto social e histórico talvez permita a resposta afirmativa. Mas não explica tudo.
Se poderiam ter feito diferente? Se calhar não; muito provavelmente não.
Dúvidas não restam, no entanto, que sem elas, o movimento pelos dtos humanos das mulheres teria perdido... mesmo sem uma Arendt auto proclamada e convicta anti feminista.

A obra está escrita num ritmo muito americano, centrada na realidade deste país e com a profundidade possível num livro desta natureza.
É interessante mas não deslumbra. Também duvido que a autora almejasse tal.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 4 - Book of the week:
As part of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker established her reputation as one of the most brilliant wits in New York and came to epitomize the liberated woman of the 1920s.

Mary McCarthy
As both a novelist and a critic McCarthy was noted for bitingly satiric commentaries on marriage, sexual expression and the role of women in contemporary urban America.

Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was a brilliant essayist - inquisitive, analytical, fearlessly outspoken. Her work is characterised by a serious philosophical approach to modern culture including the ground-breaking "Notes on Camp" and the personal and liberating "Illness as Metaphor."

Pauline Kael
The immensely influential critic of the New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991, Pauline Kael's biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused reviews espoused opinions often contrary to those of her contemporaries. She was one of the most influential American film critics of her day.

Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron was a journalist, blogger, essayist, novelist, playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and film director. She brought her sharp New York wit to all her work and in particular to the romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally.

Dean's book builds a picture of the social and political progress of women through the twentieth century from Dorothy Parker to Nora Ephron.

Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael and Nora Ephron -these brilliant women are the central figures of Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion. They are united by their 'sharpness', the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit. The world would not have been the same without Dorothy Parker's acid reflections on the absurdities of her life. Or Mary McCarthy's fiction which is noted for its acerbity in analysing the finer nuances of intellectual dilemmas. Or Susan Sontag's ideas about interpretation, or Pauline Kael's energetic swipes at filmmakers. Or Nora Ephron's biting wit and strong female characters. Together they define the cultural and intellectual history of twentieth century America.

Michelle Dean is a journalist, critic, and the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle's 2016 Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. A contributing editor at the New Republic, she has written for the New Yorker, Nation, New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York Magazine, and Elle.

abridged by Sara Davies
read by Alexandra Mathie
produced by Gaynor Macfarlane.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b0...

[Gabriela Ventura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Afiadas reúne uma série de perfis de críticas de filmes, de arte, de música, romancistas, diretoras de cinema, poetas, filósofas. Mulheres que passaram a vida envolvidas com diversos trabalhos intelectuais ao longo do século XX e se aproximaram ou rechaçaram as sufragistas, as feministas, as próprias contemporâneas.

Não são ensaios críticos, mas boas introduções ao pensamento mulheres complicadas, multifacetadas, interessantíssimas. Algumas têm mais bibliografia disponível e são, portanto, mais bem pesquisadas do que outras: os perfis de Parker, Sontag e Arendt não se comparam a outros que aparecem, especialmente no final do volume.

Acho que o grande mérito deste livro é te fazer querer ir às fontes originais assim que a leitura termina.

[Christine Henneberg · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 star (audio version)--with the caveat that I read only about 3/4 of the book.

I found these essays on smart and opinionated ("sharp") women writers to be dry and unimaginative. The writer's own voice was completely missing; I didn't know why she cared (or wasn't convince that she did care) about these women, and I found myself not caring, either.

I will also say that she offers an almost offensively inadequate explanation for the homogeneity of her chosen sample of women writers. "In a more perfect world... a black writer like Zora Neale Hurston would have been more widely recognized as part of this cohort, but racism kept her writings at the margin of it." It would seem that one of the main purposes of a book like this one should be to correct the "imperfections" of a racist history by including a deserving writer like Hurston in this cannon. To fail to do so is a good example of what I mean by the author not caring enough about her subject matter to write a meaningful book.

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't precisely what I had expected, but seeing as this turns out to be an intellectual history of notable 20th century female public thinkers, I was quite happy with what I got. Michelle Dean has a real talent for picking choice quotes and events from her subjects, and I was delighted that she takes us through how these brilliant women were socially and professionally collected. This book made me want to drop everything and pick up all the collections of writings from these women that I could get my hands on, and I feel like that is quite high praise. The Arendt sections were the stand outs for me, but then I'm rather fond of her to start off with. I appreciated how this book contextualized the "anti-feminist" criticisms I've heard about these women over the years, and would recommend to anyone who enjoys intellectual history or feminist history.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enormously enjoyable and informative group biography of women who never shrank from voicing their opinions at a time when women were rarely encouraged to do so. From Hannah Arendt to Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West to Susan Sontag, the book covers a lot of ground and is an excellent introduction to these always interesting and often controversial women. Highly recommended.

[Anatl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book follows the lives and careers of several female writers, critics and thinkers: Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler and Janet Malcolm. Some of them these authors were more familiar to me, namely Sontag, Ephron, Parker and Arendt, however, i think the strength of the book lies in the lesser known ones (at least to me) which I would like to learn more about like Janet Malcolm and Pauline Kael. I found rare enjoyment learning about their lives, their politics and the polemics that haunted them. I also loved how each chapter segued into each other by showing how these women interconnected. My only complaint is that Zora Neale Hurston has gotten too brief a treatment compared to most of the other writers.

[Sarah Perchikoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading Sharp by Michelle Dean, I wasn't under the impression that the women in this book were going to become some kind of role models for me, but I guess I expected them to be a little more together, maybe a little less petty. Now, don't get me wrong, I love some petty. Especially nowadays, petty can get you through the day, but I guess I was expecting more elegance from these women who were such trailblazers in their day. They cheated on their husbands (and were cheated on by their husbands), traded insults back and forth (to people's faces, behind their backs, and in the media), and were just all around sassy ladies. At least half of the women in the book doubted themselves and their abilities, at least two attempted to kill themselves, and most just had some terrible shit happen to them in their lives despite being famous writers (duh, right?). But let's get into the book a little bit more.

Synopsis:
Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm—these brilliant women are the central figures of Sharp. Their lives intertwine as they cut through the cultural and intellectual history of America in the twentieth century, arguing as fervently with each other as they did with the sexist attitudes of the men who often undervalued their work as critics and essayists.

Okay, let's start off with the good. This book is incredibly well-written. I usually have a tough time getting through non-fiction books, especially biographies, but I sped through this book. Each woman's story is, of course, different, but the way Dean includes specific details of their lives really allows the reader to feel like we're getting to know them personally. I never thought this would be a page-turner, but it was for me. I was so interested in what these women had to deal with during the times they lived in that I was halfway through it before I knew it. And as I said before, these women were far from perfect, some of them blatantly fighting against the feminism that would have fought to make their lives easier and a few of them (I'm betting more, it just wasn't mentioned) were racist as well (which should be a surprise to no one). A few of the women are just barely likeable but the way Dean describes the events of their lives and their relationships makes the reader want to know more despite that.

But that is not to say this book doesn't have its flaws. It has one major one. There are no women of color in this book. Okay, Zora Neale Hurston gets barely half a chapter, but nothing beyond that. Most of the women in this book are white, from affluent families, and highly privileged despite the times they lived in. You can't tell me there were no women of color writing influential pieces during this time period that could have been included in this book. And if they weren't recognized at the time, dig them up. That information, those stories would be a lot more beneficial and interesting than another Dorothy Parker or Joan Didion story. I didn't know who everyone was in this book before I started reading, so I was hoping there would be a least one (full) chapter about a woman of color (I know, low expectations), but the farther I got, the realization that there wasn't going to be one set in more and more. There were even a couple of times when I couldn't remember which stories belonged to which women because they all started to blend together.

Overall, Sharp is a good book. Like I said, it's very well-written and the stories it does tell are interesting and intriguing to read. It's the stories it doesn't tell, the lack of diversity in the stories, that is the major problem I have with this book. I give it a 3 out of 5 stars. I would love to hear any thoughts from anyone else who's read this book or reads it once it comes out.

Sharp: The Woman Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean comes out April 18, 2018.

Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Atlantic/Grove Press for this free copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Alex Sarll]

A collection studying various female writers who at least began in the 20th century, all of whom were at one or another time called 'sharp' - which may seem a bit of a stretch, as premises go, but it stands for a whole constellation of qualities: women who because they weren't 'nice' were sometimes considered destructive, but who also tended to have at least somewhat vexed relationships to the feminist movement one might have expected to welcome them. I requested it from Netgalley principally because I’m a fan of the first and last of them, Dorothy Parker and Janet Malcolm; in between lie others of whom I've read bits (Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt), but also several inhabiting that New Yorker-y expanse of post-war America which I've always tended to bounce off. Its male writers too, I should add - yes, I've managed a novel each by eg Bellow and Roth, but they remain nearly as shadowy to me as the likes of Joan Didion, Pauline Kael and Mary McCarthy herein. And Renata Adler I'm not sure I've ever heard of before, nor do I much wish to again; Dean notes, as how could she not, the oft-remarked 'likability problem' for women in public life, but she certainly doesn't go out of her way to allay it, and in Adler's case it seems like it would be a pretty perverse and Herculean task even to try.

There is an attempt to create a sort of intellectual relay race, one woman handing on the baton to the next as each chapter gives way to its successor; the link might be a shared interest, a review, a meeting. This comes off better on some occasions than others, and in particular the Zora Neale Hurston section seems a little crowbarred in and - unintentionally, I'm sure - almost insulting in its brevity. Dean’s introduction notes that her selection might seem a little white, but it feels as if it might have been better to examine that, and ask whether America could sort-of handle intellectuals who were female or black, but maybe not both. Or else make a stronger case for Hurston as parallel to the other women here (I’m not familiar with her work, so can’t comment as to whether such a case exists), or perhaps tie in a whole companion volume on the different ways in which black female intellectuals were sidelined, putting Hurston in a lineage with Angelou, Morrison, Butler…I don’t know. The instinct to diversify was commendable, but this section doesn’t feel like it came off.

Still, on the whole it’s a very interesting read. Perhaps the attempts to find parallels don’t always stick, but even considered simply as a collection of brief lives, well, many of these lives are not that widely known, and collecting them was always going to at least offer a certain prismatic approach to a truth. The connections to the modern day are seldom stressed, being left instead for the reader themselves to note, as when the initial response to Arendt’s now standard line about the 'banality of evil’ prefigures a modern Twitterstorm, right down to the bit where some of those outraged by it were responding more to their own jumped conclusions than what was actually written. Dean has done her research – this seems especially fruitful when she compares collected journalism to pieces the same writers chose not to republish, thus deducing the ways in which they sought to tilt and construct their public personae – and more than that she’s assimilated her material, which is the bit enabling arresting insights such as “It can be easy to forget that Dorothy Parker began publishing her caustic verse before women even had the vote."

[Megan Abbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding, must-read book--lovers of Didion, Sontag, Dorothy Parker or all the other brilliant women explored here: this is for you. A gift to the discussion of 20th-century arts and letters. And a lovesong to smart women.

[Mariana Osorio Schlögl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“De Língua Afiada” de Michelle Dean resume a vida de 10 mulheres escritoras, dando ênfase à parte da vida delas como escritoras de críticas. Daí o “de língua afiada”. O livro transcreve muitas partes dessas críticas e, sendo sincera, tive muitas dificuldades em distinguir o que seria uma crítica útil e construtiva de uma crítica feita por uma mulher amarga e pouco simpática. Uma parte de uma crítica não é o mesmo que o seu todo. E foi exactamente assim que os seus pares se sentiram!
Gostei bastante da forma como passamos de uma capítulo para o outro, conectando estas mulheres que muitas vezes cruzaram caminhos, fazendo uma paragem obrigatória por Nova Iorque.

Problemas (Meus):
- a tradução. Não digo que não esteja óptima. Claro que está! Mas no original a leitura deverá ser mais fluída. A língua portuguesa não faz jus às palavras mordazes e geniais de mulheres como Didion ou Arendt (desculpa Camões! Não peço desculpa a Pessoa porque tendo trabalhado como tradutor do inglês deve perceber isto!). Sempre que pegava no livro demorava a que as suas palavras corressem de forma livre. Senti sempre um travão que associei à tradução (não culpa do tradutor, mas sim da língua portuguesa).
- a ênfase dada à critica. Já expliquei um pouco sobre isto mas a verdade é que tendo dado tanta ênfase a esta faceta delas como escritoras de críticas e os problemas que daí vieram, tocando apenas superficialmente noutras partes das suas vidas (pessoais ou profissionais), ficou difícil simpatizar com estas mulheres. Eu sei que o objectivo deste livro era falar de “Mulheres que fizeram da opinião uma arte”, mas senti que faltava algo por não conhecer tão bem as suas vidas. Na verdade, eu só conhecia 3 destas mulheres (Arendt, Didion e Ephron) e elas são muito mais do que as críticas que escreveram. Tenho medo que um livro destes não chegue a tantas pessoas por se concentrar nas ditas escritas de críticas. O que é claramente uma pena pois mulheres deste calibre deviam ser de conhecimento geral.

O que mais gostei: de como estas mulheres foram vistas, principalmente na sua altura, como não feministas (algumas até se consideravam assim) por não seguirem a luta feminista como esta estava a ser lutada (seja na primeira ou na segunda vaga). Estas mulheres foram essenciais à luta feminista – desbravaram caminhos infestados de homens e navegaram águas consideradas impróprias para as mulheres. Algumas destas mulheres pararam as suas carreiras para se dedicarem aos filhos, outras adoravam maquilhagem e de se arranjarem de forma considerada “feminina”, e uma até disse que certos trabalhos eram para homens! Não vou entrar aqui em considerações sobre isto, mas este tema interessou-me pois eu, em pleno sec. XXI e após ter trabalhado como advogada, sou uma “stay at home mother”, considerada por muitas (mulheres) pouco feminista.

[thaís bambozzi · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pesquisa biográfica feita pela autora do livro é verdadeiramente impressionante, é perceptível como ela mergulhou fundo no universo da vida de cada uma das dez pensadoras que ela aborda. Não achei uma leitura muito prazerosa e fluída, o conteúdo factual é denso e muitas vezes acho que a autora se perde em fofocas desimportantes. No entanto, foi uma leitura boa para conhecer novas escritoras e críticas como Janet Malcolm e Rebecca West, e me aproximar de outras tantas como Didion e Sontag. É importante constar também que só não abandonei o livro porque li grande parte dele em conjunto com uma amiga, o que serviu de grande incentivo para que eu continuasse seguindo para os próximos capítulos.

[Chelsea Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt like a school report on the different women - and while commending them for standing by their opinions, focused a LOT on the men who played a role in their successes. Rough transitions, and I didn’t like the writing style one bit. Glad I learned some new names, however. I’ll be diving more into the women discussed through other mediums.

[Lauren LoGiudice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was gathered together some of the most important female writers of the 20th century and let you know how they got on that list.

It's not exhaustive, of course. And it wasn't overly light. It was a great mix of stories and descriptions of their work and why it was notable. I especially liked to hear about how many of these women knew of each other and worked together, or actively disliked one another.

[PaperDreams55 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me encantan los libros que recopilan biografías porque siempre aprendo y conozco a diferentes mujeres con opiniones muy distintas.
Esto es lo que pasa en esta lectura, ellas dijeron lo que querían decir pero muy fueron criticadas e incluso subestimadas por ello.
No todas pensaban ni defendían lo mismo, de hecho hay muchas que no se consideraban feministas pero que aunque no se nombran como tal, actuaban defendiendo la igualdad y los derechos de las mujeres.
Me han gustado las biografías porque no se quedan solo en la superficie sino que ahondan en sus vidas y en su forma de pensar.
Creo que es un libro para leerlo con calma, saboreándolo poco a poco, de hecho, leerlo del tirón puede resultar agotador por la cantidad de información que contiene.
Es ideal para compaginarlo con otras lecturas.

[Cristina Bessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aguça a curiosidade para saber mais sobre as mulheres mencionadas, mas não é um trabalho profundo sobre a biografia, ou importância das pessoas que retrata. Aborda alguns aspetos das vida das autoras, cronologicamente, e a forma como as suas opiniões foram 'ouvidas' e interpretadas. Útil pois aumentou a vontade de saber mais.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the profiles of each of the women and how they made their mark on criticism and essaying. That said, I wish that they had covered a group that was a little more diverse (Zora Neale Hurston is the only author of color mentioned, and she has to share a chapter) and that a little less of the focus was spent on trying to show how all of these women interconnected and influenced one another - sometimes they really didn't, other than writing in overlapping timeframes in different venues/areas of focus.

[India]

this kind of depressed me b/c the role of critic has basically died due to social media :-(

[Mel]

DNF @ 14%. Not sure what it was exactly, but I just wasn’t feeling this book

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una cuidada selección de distintas mujeres ensayistas que trabajaron y publicaron en Estados Unidos (Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Nora Zeale Hurston, Jane Malcolm, entre otras) y que se influenciaron, conocieron, amigaron y enemistaron a lo largo de las décadas. Una pequeña biografía de cada una de ellas se entrelaza con el detalle de su trabajo y opiniones sobre el cine, el arte y la cultura. Muy interesante, sobre todo para conocer la influencia que tuvo cada una de ellas en las otras.

[Carla Botteon Catai · Rating 2 out of 5]

vou confessar que achei meia boca porque não sabia quem eram metade das escritoras

[Molinos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es ensayo que recoge la historia de varias mujeres que opinaron sin miedo, siendo muchas veces muy agresivas y sufriendo consecuencias tanto por lo que dijeron o como lo dijeron como por lo que callaron. Es interesante, ameno y crítico. No es una oda a las mujeres, no es una exaltación de lo femenino como una cumbre de perfección a salvo de equivocaciones ni es una letanía por la invisibilidad sufrida en el mundo de la opinión. Dean ni esconde ni justifica los errores: Parker y su final "sin talento", Didion y sus vaivenes sobre el feminismo, Arendt y su tibieza con la segregación o el racismo o el hecho de que muchas tuvieran relaciones con hombres que las manipularon y que se aprovecharon de ellas. En el amor da igual lo listo que seas, todos hacemos el idiota igual.

Dean sigue más o menos el mismo esquema en todos los perfiles, desde Dorothy Parker a Rebeca Mead: qué les hizo famosas, como llegaron a hacerse escritoras, los errores que cometieron, las consecuencias de los mismos, las trifulcas y polémicas en las que se vieron envueltas, sus virtudes como escritoras y también sus defectos, su posición en o frente al feminismo y las relaciones tanto de amistad como de animadversión que desarrollaron entre ellas.

Todas ellas empezaron "fuera", en los márgenes de la opinión escrita y de ahí su acidez, de ahí su empeño en ser afiladas:
«Su estilo polémico en ocasiones provocó que se pasara por alto a estas mujeres, que no se las considerara serias. La ironía, el sarcasmo, la sátira son a menudo las armas de quienes están en los márgenes, el subproducto de un escepticismo natural respecto a las opiniones ortodoxas que es consecuencia de no haber podido participar en su formulación. En mi opinión, deberíamos prestar más atención a cualquier intento de intervención cuanto tiene ese matiz. Siempre hay valor intelectual en no ser como el resto de las personas sentadas a una mesa, en este caso en no ser un hombre, pero también en no ser blanco, de clase alta, y no haber estudiado en la universidad adecuada».
Me ha llamado la atención que casi todas se dedicaran en algún momento de su vida a hacer crítica de cine y muchas se forjaran ahí en la polémica y el enfrentamiento. Ninguna tenía ningún problema en criticar con saña a otros y entre ellas. Eran implacables con las películas y también con los libros. Ahora ya nadie hace eso. Algunas perdieron sus trabajos por esas críticas. Ahora ya nadie hace eso o no se les permite. O quizás es que todos queremos estar sentados a la mesa, ya no estamos en los márgenes, y por eso nos guardamos la crítica, el sarcasmo y la sátira para el "humor" y no para la crítica ni cinematográfica ni literaria. (Hablo de medios "oficiales")

Todas también tuvieron problemas para posicionarse con el feminismo. Y como no hemos inventado nada, muchas fueron acusadas, en sus épocas, de malas feministas.

Me quedo con esta conclusión de Dean al final del libro:
«Las expectativas que tienen las mujeres, las unas respecto a las otras, la manera en que nos medimos las unas con las otras, nos ilusionamos y también nos decepcionamos, en eso consiste, al parecer, ser una mujer que piensa y sala sobre el acto de pensar, en público».

[fer pacheco · Rating 3 out of 5]

al final es la vida de las 5 mujeres blancas del mismo círculo literio de nueva york, esperaba un poco más de diversidad (la autora lo describe como diverso). creo que hace una buena chamba sistematizando algunos aspectos de la vida de estas morras y sus encontrones con otras morras (not in a lesbian way). los capítulos combinación no están bien construidos pero me gustó ver cómo se construyeron las redes intelectuales de la alta cultura gringa. de la que no sabía nada era de pauline kael y me gustó su línea sobre la cultura pop.

siento que a veces mete personajes que ni al caso y de la nada (como hellman) y se hace bola sin mostrar otras cosas clave (porque son conocidas?). quiero leer las cartas fr mccsrthy con arendt y creo que se simento mi posición de que didion meh.