Mary McCarthy could com­mand a room. ​“She stood in what I lat­er rec­og­nized as a char­ac­ter­is­tic stance, right foot for­ward and bal­anced on a high heel,” recalled poet Eileen Simp­son of the time they met. ​“In one hand she held a cig­a­rette, in the oth­er a martini.”

All these women fought sexism, but, by and large, did not identify with the feminist movement.

There are moments like this, where a writer makes an impres­sion, through­out Michelle Dean’s Sharp, a col­lec­tive biog­ra­phy of women, like McCarthy, ​“who made an art of hav­ing an opin­ion.” Even pri­vate moments seem designed to impress, like Susan Sontag’s rec­ol­lec­tion that, while she was writ­ing her first nov­el, her 10-year-old son, David Rieff, would ​“stand by her and light her cig­a­rettes as she typed.”

Through­out Sharp, we wit­ness enough time­ly encoun­ters with edi­tors and friend­ships forged from crit­i­cal reviews to show just how depen­dent on rela­tion­ships these women’s work was. But to have an opin­ion is to stake out ground, to stand apart. Dean argues that the writ­ers she pro­files, from Dorothy Park­er and Rebec­ca West to Nora Ephron and Janet Mal­colm, saw them­selves as out­siders and wield­ed their wit — the ​“sharp­ness” of the book’s title — against a world that often had no place for them.

Fit­ting­ly, she begins with Dorothy Park­er, whose wit­ti­cisms set the stan­dard for out­last­ing their tar­gets, as when she wrote of the then-prime minister’s wife and socialite, ​“The affair between Mar­got Asquith and Mar­got Asquith will live as one of the pret­ti­est love sto­ries in all literature.”

The chap­ters are art­ful­ly inter­wo­ven through the con­nec­tions these women had to each oth­er: as read­ers and crit­ics of one another’s work, rivals, men­tors, influ­ences. Rena­ta Adler, for a time, was even engaged to McCarthy’s son. The women were at times also friends, although rarely with­out ambiva­lence, and not as much as a read­er may hope.

Dean roots for her sub­jects to come togeth­er, not­ing, for exam­ple, that “[Pauline] Kael and [Joan] Did­ion nev­er gave up the grudge and became friends. … This was a shame. The pair could have com­mis­er­at­ed on more sub­jects than just the mat­ter of Woody Allen.” (Both had dis­sent­ed from the acco­lades sur­round­ing Man­hat­tan, one of many sacred cows Dean’s women take delight in skew­er­ing. Kael and Did­ion were also known for dis­lik­ing The Sound of Music.) A shame but not a sur­prise, giv­en that Did­ion had said Kael’s crit­i­cism had ​“a kind of petit-pointon-Kleenex effect which rarely stands much scrutiny.”

The costs of sharp­ness were real: Along with rup­tured friend­ships, sev­er­al of the women Dean pro­files faced law­suits for their words. Many strug­gled inter­nal­ly with the lim­its of sharp­ness, mov­ing from crit­i­cism and polemic to artis­tic cre­ation: Son­tag yearned for her nov­els and films to be as well received as her essays, Adler ded­i­cat­ed a decade to nov­els and Did­ion pur­sued screenwriting.

Dean’s book comes at a time of renewed atten­tion to the his­to­ry of fem­i­nism, and the most fas­ci­nat­ing parts of the book deal with the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship these women bore to the move­ment. In a soci­ety in which women’s tal­ents and ambi­tions are met with hos­til­i­ty, indi­vid­ual achieve­ment feels like fem­i­nist rebel­lion, yet fem­i­nism, like all social move­ments, demands sol­i­dar­i­ty and col­lec­tiv­i­ty. (There is a fas­ci­nat­ing com­pan­ion book to be writ­ten about writ­ers who nav­i­gat­ed this while being ​“inside” the move­ment, writ­ers like Adri­enne Rich, Alix Kates Shul­man and Kate Mil­lett, all of whom appear in pass­ing in Sharp as foils or crit­i­cal targets.)

All these women fought sex­ism, but, by and large, did not iden­ti­fy with the fem­i­nist move­ment. Some, like Han­nah Arendt, saw the whole ques­tion as beneath them; oth­ers, like Did­ion, turned their sharp­ness on the move­ment in their writ­ing; while oth­ers, like Son­tag, expressed both sym­pa­thy and skep­ti­cism. Ephron embraced a role as a fem­i­nist writer, but here, too, there is ambiva­lence: ​“She knew she was sup­posed to count [fem­i­nist authors’] good inten­tions into the final crit­i­cal cal­cu­lus, of course: ​‘This is what’s known in the women’s move­ment as sis­ter­hood, and it is good pol­i­tics, I sup­pose, but it is not good criticism.’ ”

Yet the pull of col­lec­tiv­i­ty per­sists through­out the book, as will the desire of many read­ers to see these women as fem­i­nist role mod­els. Dean notes with sym­pa­thy that ​“it’s not con­sid­ered very sis­ter­ly to believe one stands out from the pack,” and makes clear how the specter of the ​“excep­tion­al woman” shaped these lives. Rival­ry abound­ed. The con­trast with Rich, who wrote that an authen­tic life depends on doing away with the sense of one’s unique­ness, could hard­ly be more striking.

Yet even Son­tag, who is per­haps the most asso­ci­at­ed with her celebri­ty image, strug­gled to be part of some­thing larg­er than New York’s var­i­ous intel­lec­tu­al cliques. She wrote mov­ing­ly of the gen­uine sol­i­dar­i­ty she found between rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­rades on her vis­it to Viet­nam, how­ev­er unfa­mil­iar it was to her expe­ri­ence and sen­si­bil­i­ty. Report­ing from El Sal­vador, Did­ion won­ders about how to get out of her own way, feel­ing the insuf­fi­cien­cy of her irony in the face of suffering.

Per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, Park­er, the most famous embod­i­ment of sharp­ness, felt the pull of the col­lec­tive as deeply as any of Dean’s sub­jects. The fight against the exe­cu­tion of Sac­co and Vanzetti pushed her to activism on behalf of the anti-fas­cist strug­gle, unions and civ­il rights, and she left her estate to the NAACP. For Park­er, being part of some­thing big­ger also meant set­ting aside the wit that made her famous. As she would reflect in the New Mass­es: ​“I heard some­one say, and so I said it too, that ridicule is the most effec­tive weapon. I don’t sup­pose I ever real­ly believed it, but it was easy and com­fort­ing, and so I said it. Well, now I know. I know there are things that nev­er have been fun­ny, and nev­er will be. And I know that ridicule maybe a shield, but it is not a weapon.”