Thinking in Public

The past few years have marked a golden age for women critics and essayists. In 2017, there were trenchant new collections from Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, Mary Gaitskill, and more. And much-anticipated new books of essays by Zadie Smith and Marilynne Robinson have been published in the first few months of this year. In Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Grove), the Los Angeles–based Canadian writer Michelle Dean explores the experiences of the genre’s pioneers, a wave of twentieth-century critics who included Dorothy Parker, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Mary McCarthy. (The book’s title captures both their wonderfully incisive writing styles and the label frequently affixed to them by their mostly male peers.)

Dean is a journalist and critic and recipient of a National Book Critics Circle citation for excellence in reviewing. She has contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, The...