The Company She Keeps

The Company She Keeps (1942) is the debut and a semi-autobiographical novel by American writer Mary McCarthy. It is an unconventional work, tracing the journey of a highly politicized young Catholic college graduate through various stages of emotional development, in unusually frank and revealing detail. The story blends many themes that had marked the author’s own life, such as patriarchy, feminism, rebellion and betrayal, as expressed in her later autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). The six episodes do not follow directly in sequence, and some had already been published as magazine fiction. Critics noted that some of the characters are easily recognizable portraits from the contemporary New York literary scene. Background Autobiographical elements Margaret Sargent, protagonist of The Company She Keeps, closely resembles McCarthy’s account of herself in her later autobiography Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957). But this was not obvious for more than a decade after this novel was published.