Mary McCarthy was beautiful when young and sharply handsome later on. She was the "Dark Lady of American Letters," tart tongued, astringently brilliant, a fierce gossip. Edmund Wilson, to whom she was married for a thoroughly horrible seven years, quoted a man who told her, "You're the only girl I ever knew who had the same kind of brains as a man and yet at the same time was perfectly beautiful."
In Seeing Mary Plain (Norton; 939 pages; $35), Frances Kiernan, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist,...
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