Superior Women

Book excerpt: The timeless coming-of-age novel about five young women who meet at Radcliffe College and together grow to maturity—through intrigues, ambitions, affairs, and marriages—from World War II to the 1980s. Lavinia, Peg, and Cathy seem to have little in common save for their freshman status. None of them could know that their destinies are about to inextricably intertwine. Across four decades, as time and events upend their expectations, these five women discover their sexuality, reveal their secrets, and struggle with independence—sometimes surrendering, sometimes making stunning choices. Now reissued thirty-five years after its original release, Alice Adams’s Superior Women, hailed as “a remarkable compression of time, memory, and sentiment—rather as if Hemingway had been turned loose on Proust” (San Francisco Chronicle), is a richly drawn, uncompromising novel about women’s intimate, interior lives for fans of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything.