Adams's characters are great readers, and their choice of novelists gives us an idea of Adams's literary milieu, as well as a key to the characters themselves. Lavinia admires Marcel Proust, especially the Duchess de Guermantes; Cathy and Megan share a liking for Henry James; and Janet reads John Dos Passos. The type of narrative Adams writes, however, is also in the tradition of the Victorians, not only Dickens, but also Mrs. Gaskel and George Gissing; modern writers who may have influenced her include Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bo wen, and Margaret Drabble. The young women themselves joke about how their group resembles those in the girls' boarding school novels popular in their youth, even to the typical characters found there, as in the novels of Rona Jaffe, Marilyn French, Marge Piercy and, of course, Mary McCarthy, whose novel, The Group (1963; see separate entry), is...