Colm Tóibín introduces this welcome reprint of the US author and critic’s poignant account of orphanhood, first published in 1957

Mary McCarthy was a formidable, not to say frightening, figure in the literary landscape of mid-20th-century America, one of a cohort of remarkable left-leaning intellectuals that included Elizabeth Hardwick, Dwight Macdonald, Randall Jarrell and McCarthy’s lifelong friend Hannah Arendt. The famous feud between McCarthy and the playwright Lillian Hellman – “every word Hellman writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’” – led to a $2.5m libel suit brought by Hellman but which in the end damaged her own reputation beyond repair.

McCarthy was already an established critic and fiction writer when, in 1963, she published The Group, the novel that was to bring her huge popular success. It is an account of the lives of a set of young women in postwar New York and, for its time, was frank to the point of being scandalous. Anyone reading it now will wonder what the fuss was about, given its bloodless psychologising and wooden prose.

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply