We Are 'The Group' Trivia Quiz

Answer: Kay Strong

The book begins with Kay's low-key wedding to Harald, who she met while working as an apprentice in a theatre. Kay is from Salt Lake City. She gets a job in Macy's as a saleswoman, while Harald is a stage manager and frustrated playwright. He is fired from his job as an assistant stage manager after having an argument with the director. Harald writes a play based on his father's life and a producer buys an option, and Kay throws a party to celebrate. Harald gets drunk at the party, mocks Kay and throws several things down the incinerator, including the play script; however, other people have copies. He is verbally abusive to Kay and cheats on her with multiple women.

Kay and Harald later get into a fight when she accuses him of having an affair, and he hits her. She threatens him with a bread knife and he locks her in a dressing room; the elevator boys hear her crying and banging and call the police, but Harald lies that they were rehearsing a scene from a play. Harald gets Kay committed to a psychiatric unit, where she has her belt taken away as a potential suicide risk. Polly, who works at the hospital, helps care for her. Dr Ridgeley offers to get Kay out of the hospital, but she refuses. Harald turns up with flowers and apologises, but Kay does not believe him.

Answer: Helena Davison

Helena is from Cleveland and was Kay's roommate at Vassar. Her mother is Canadian and friendly with Kay, and is very keen on encouraging her daughter's interests and making sure she is well-rounded. Because of this, Helena can play multiple instruments, sports and card games, and owns various hobby items, from a printing press to a leatherwork kit. At Vassar, she wrote a column for the newspaper, the 'Class Notes', and is seen as the 'droll' one of the group, and their mascot. She is implied to be asexual and indeed, is the only member of the group not in a relationship. She gets a job teaching finger painting at an experimental school in Cleveland, much to her parents' disapproval.

Helena goes to Norine Schmittlapp Blake's house after Kay's party, and Norine asks her for advice. Helena suggests cleaning her house, taking Nietzsche the dog for a walk, buying toilet paper, washing her hairbrush and getting a hobby, but Norine is not interested. Helena later visits her mother and discovers that Harald and Norine's husband Putnam have been arrested during a walkout in solidarity with a waiters' strike, and charged with disorderly conduct.

Answer: Pokey Prothero

Mary, aka Pokey, is the richest member of the Group and has a younger sister, Phyllis. She loves animals and is studying agriculture at Cornell, and has her own plane and a pilot's licence; she commutes to Cornell by plane. She has poor eyesight and no sense of smell, and is very lazy, relying on coaching and copying people's work to get through university. Of note, she is the only member of the Group not to get a point-of-view chapter; instead, her section is told through the eyes of Hatton, the Prothero family's English butler, who is popular with her friends.

Hatton disapproves of Kay as he caught her and Harald having sex on the landing of the Protheros' mansion. He discovers in the newspaper - like Helena and her mother - that Harald has been arrested, and shows Mrs Prothero, who is horrified that a 'jailbird' has been in their house, and orders Hatton to burn the newspaper so nobody sees it. Pokey later marries a Mr Beauchamp and has three children with him; when Lakey comes to visit, she goes to the stables with the twins.

Answer: Elinor 'Lakey' Eastlake

Elinor is nicknamed Lakey partly because her surname is Eastlake, and partly because she comes from Lake Forest, near Chicago. She is cold and aloof, although she is revealed to be very good with children, and the next richest of the Group next to Pokey. She is the one who introduced Kay to the Group. Dick Brown is fascinated by her and calls her the 'dark beauty'. At Kay's wedding, she leaves the taxi she is sharing with Dottie and Libby to get rice to throw.

Lakey spends most of the book in Europe after studying art history in Paris, but returns to the US when the Second World War breaks out. She brings several boxes and trunks full of goods on the boat with her. The Group come to meet her and get a surprise when Lakey brings her new 'friend', Maria, the Baroness d'Estienne, with her; she is a German divorcée and as it turns out, she is not just a friend of Lakey, but her girlfriend. The Group have mixed feelings about Lakey's lesbianism.

Answer: Dottie Renfrew

Dottie is from Boston - Dick Brown's nickname for her is 'Boston' - and she is described as having a typically Bostonian face, with a long nose and pronounced 'New England jaw'. At Kay and Harald's wedding, she meets Dick, a poor painter who has just divorced his wife, Betty. Dottie and Dick have a one-night stand and Dick warns her not to fall in love with him, and to get a cap fitted. At the time 'The Group' is set, contraception was illegal in Massachusetts, so in order to have sex with Dick, Dottie has to have a cap fitted in New York. The female doctor gives her a douche bag and other contraceptive items, and Dottie waits for Dick in a park with her packages. When it becomes clear that he isn't coming, she leaves the contraception under a bench and gets a taxi home.

Dottie later realises that she still has feelings for Dick and her mother - who is ahead of her time - suggests postponing her wedding to Brook Latham, a rich man from Arizona, but Dottie ultimately decides that she needs to stay away from Dick. By the end of the book, she is pregnant with Brook's child and living in Arizona.

Answer: Polly Andrews

Polly's family lost their money in the Depression, with Polly needing a scholarship to finish college, and her father, an architect, lost his job. She works as a technician in a hospital Mental illness runs in her family, to the point where she is afraid to have children. She is friendly with her eccentric neighbours, Mr Schneider (a Trotskyite German Jew) and Mr Scherbatyeff (from Belarus), and has an affair with Gus LeRoy, who is undergoing analysis and in the process of separating from his wife; however, they cannot see each other on Sundays as he spends them with his son. Gus becomes fascinated with the Spanish Civil War and is also a supporter of Stalin. He and Polly later split up when he decides to go back to his wife.

Around the same time that Polly and Gus split, Polly's parents get divorced and her father comes to live with her while her mother takes over the family farm. They move into a new apartment together. He has bipolar disorder and is a compulsive spender, and converts to Trotskyism thanks to Mr Schneider. Polly's aunt Julia and Ross, her maid, help her out but Polly still needs extra money, and sells her blood. Jim Ridgeley, a doctor she is friendly with at the hospital, finds out and offers to marry her after confessing his love to her. He also offers to help look after Mr Andrews. The couple later have a daughter.

Answer: Priss Hartshorn

Priss is a supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She originally works for the NRA, but becomes unemployed because the Supreme Court rules the NRA unconstitutional, and gets a job with the League of Women Shoppers, although she does not see it as a proper job and is glad to give it up. She has three miscarriages, but eventually gives birth to a son, Stephen, so named because he was born on Boxing Day. Some of her friends send her gifts; Dottie sends her a sterilisation kit, while Pokey - who is now the mother of twins - sends her baby scales.

Sloan Crockett, Priss's husband, is a Republican paediatrician and is strongly in favour of breastfeeding, unlike Priss's mother, who saw bottle feeding as liberating. Most of the babies in the hospital are bottle fed, but Priss breastfeeds Stephen at Sloan's insistence; he believes breastfeeding will help Stephen's immune system and make him gain weight. However, Priss has difficulties getting Stephen to latch on and he often cries for long periods. One of the nurses suggests giving him an additional bottle, but Sloan talks Priss out of it, as he fears Stephen will become dependent. Priss also adheres to a strict feeding timetable.

Answer: Libby MacAusland

Libby did her degree in English, has studied in Italy and speaks Italian and French, and is also a big reader. She is a gossip and is particularly interested in Italian culture. She gets a job reading manuscripts and writing summaries for Gus LeRoy, a publisher, and he suggests that she write a novel, but when she decides to do translation work, she comes undone. Gus gives her an Italian manuscript, but she struggles with it as it is written in Sicilian dialect. Gus fires her and tells her that publishing is a 'man's business', and she faints in shock after accidentally dropping a lit cigarette on his rug. However, with Gus's help, she manages to get a job as a literary agent's assistant and eventually becomes a literary agent herself.

A year later, Libby hosts a party with Polly's help and invites some of the Group, along with people from the publishing industry; she also invites her current boyfriend, Nils Aslund, a Norwegian baron and ski instructor. When they are alone, Nils makes advances and quotes Christopher Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love'; Libby replies with Walter Raleigh's 'The Shepherdess Replies'. Nils tries to rape Libby and rips her dress; however, he loses interest when she tells him she is a virgin. She later marries one of her authors, a writer of historical fiction.

Answer: Kay Strong

Norine is very political and interested in left-wing politics, and finds the Group too bourgeois; she also dislikes Lakey because the two of them had an argument over Cézanne pictures in the Vassar smoking room. She and her husband Putnam play cards with the Petersens, and she is having an affair with Harald; Helena catches the two of them kissing in the kitchen, and Norine invites her over because she worries Helena will tell Kay. She has a dog called Nietzsche and lives on the ground floor of an apartment owned by a pair of decorators. She tells Helena about how she and Harald were caught having sex by a pair of detectives who went into the wrong apartment.

Priss later runs into Norine in the park while out with her son Stephen, who is having toileting issues. Norine is now married to a rich Jewish man, Freddy Rogers, who cheats on her with an Irish maid, and has a son, Ichabod. She has lost interest in politics and confesses to Priss that she loved Harald. She also conspires with Harald to have Kay committed to the psychiatric unit, believing Kay to be a closet lesbian with 'persecution delusions'.

Answer: Kay Strong

The funeral takes place seven years later, when the Second World War has broken out. Kay fell out of a window at the Vassar Club while watching planes; she had feared that Hitler would invade the US due to the attack on Britain, and had become obsessed with the war coming to the US, while Harald had become an America First supporter. Helena's mother, who was the last person to see Kay alive and came to claim her body, insists that it was an accident, but Harald believes Kay killed herself to get at him. The Group arrange Kay's funeral as she had little contact with her parents; Helena gets in touch with them to make arrangements, Lakey buys her a dress and Polly, Ross and Mrs Davison dress her body.

Most of the Group attend the funeral, along with the Baroness, Putnam, Norine and Dick Brown, who has aged badly. Pokey and Dottie are unable to come (unlike in the film), so Hatton and Mrs Renfrew respectively attend in their place. The mood changes when Harald - who was not invited - arrives and the Group are uneasy with his presence. After the funeral, Harald gives Lakey a lift to the burial and becomes homophobic and abusive towards her, believing she had an affair with Kay (which Lakey refuses to answer, although it is implied that while she was attracted to Kay, nothing happened). He gets out of the car and hitches a ride home while she drives to the burial.