SOURCE: “The Culture Critics: Diana Trilling, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, and Nora Sayre,” in Women on Film: The Critical Eye, Praeger, 1983, pp. 103-12.

In the following essay, McCreadie identifies traits specific to women film critics, including Trilling.

If one thinks it is still to be proven that women film critics generally react more directly, more intimately—and in some cases more imaginatively—to the performer in films under their scrutiny than male critics, the responses of women writers as intellectually formidable as Simone de Beauvoir and Diana Trilling should settle the question. In fact, no one seems as surprised to encounter such subjective and intense reactions as Trilling herself, in partial apology for her “late” appreciation of the star, in the 1963 essay “The Death of Marilyn Monroe.” While the essay surely can be seen in the light of the women's movement's posthumous canonization of Monroe, it is...