Maggie Doherty on Sharing Art and Ideas
In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics
The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: Maggie Doherty and I have known each other for 13 years, which I know because I met her at the same party where I met my husband. For the past 13 years, she’s been the person that I speak to daily about reading, writing, and teaching. Maggie is even keeled and generous and above all supremely responsible, which is a quality that I sometimes find lacking in the criticism that I read. She’s also the most small-c catholic critic that I know. She knows how to gain pleasure from many different kinds of objects, how to judge fairly and graciously, how to check her antagonisms, and mine, and for that I count myself very, very lucky. Her approach to what she writes about is profoundly humane and convivial. Reading Maggie is like listening to her have a conversation with the author she’s writing about. And she tends to write about the past and the present of feminism and about the communities in which feminist ideas can become realities.
Maggie has a PhD from Harvard where she teaches in the English department. She’s the author of The Equivalence, a history of the Radcliffe Institute, and the extraordinary women artists and writers that were its fellows. The Equivalence was widely praised and was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award in Biography. She’s written for The New Yorker on Arienne Rich, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tillie Olsen, Delmore Schwartz, and Carson McCullers, as well as for the Yale Review, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, N +1, Parapraxis, and The New Republic. I’m honored and delighted to have her as our guest today.
For a full transcript and details of the piece Maggie Doherty responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Maggie Doherty is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (2020), which won the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Nation, among other publications. She teaches in the English department at Harvard.
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The Critic and Her Publics
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