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The Equivalents: The Untold Story of the Five Friends Who Started a Personal, Political, and Artistic Revolution
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53
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
54/100Critics
52/100Scholars
Author:
Maggie Doherty
Publisher:
Knopf Publishing Group
Date:
May 19, 2020
In 1960, Radcliffe College announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, offering fellowships to women with a PhD or 'the equivalent' in artistic success. Doherty follows poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen as they navigate the Institute, friendship, and the fraught path of art-making in a man's world.
What The Reviewers Say
... electricity is palpable in Doherty’s pages. I have rarely, if ever, read a work of non-fiction that chronicled relationships like these, with women in conversation about everything except men. Even Sylvia Plath appears without Ted Hughes, befriending Sexton at a poetry seminar in Boston. There were moments when I wanted to know more about the rest of their lives—the troubles in Sexton’s marriage, including her multiple affairs, are mentioned only in passing. But I understood, also, why Doherty focuses so tightly on the Institute. Her book is a love story about art and female friendship.
... [an] engaging work of cultural biography.
The book reads like a novel, and an intense one at that.
Doherty focuses on five women: three writers, Kumin, Sexton, and Tillie Olsen; the painter Barbara Swan, who specialized in expressionist portraits dense with texture and emotions; and the sculptor Marianna Pineda, a Brookline mother of three who longed for recognition from an artistic community.
