This is a lovely book about the English and American women in the Paris expatriot literary community during the early Twentieth Century. It's an oversize paperback with lots of photographs, which was one of the reasons I bought it. However it turns out that the text is much more fascinating than the photographs. The back cover suggested shelving it under biography and women's studies, which is a shame because that will probably mean that a lot of people who would be interested in it will never notice it.
After I finished it, I mailed it off to a woman friend who I thought would appreciate it, so unfortunately I have to make these comments from memory. This means that I am able to mention only a few of the many women discussed in the book.
The hidden message of the book is that most of the English and American women in Paris during the first half of this century were lesbians, or at least very much bisexual. And while one might fault the author for not giving more attention to primarily heterosexual women such as Anais Nin, it was certainly fascinating to me to discover how many of the names that were very familiar to me were in fact lesbian. (She does include Colette, who of course was French, and who was married, I believe, three times. However Colette had probably more female lovers than male ones.)
The first main subject is Sylvia Beach, the founder of the famous bookstore called Shakespeare's, and the woman responsible for the publication of some of the most important and most controversial writings of the period, most especially Joyce's Ulysses. Sylvia's lover Adrienne Monnier, who also owned a bookstore, is less well known but also played a very important role in the expatriot literary scene. In fact, it was sometimes due to Adrienne's financial support that Beach was able to keep her Shakespeare and Company afloat.
Djuna Barnes is another woman discussed at great length, and reading about her inspired me to add Nightwood to my reading list. Barnes's lover was Thelma Wood, and I have to admit that I no longer recall what Wood was famous for in her own right.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are of course another main topic. As is Janet Flanner, who for about fifty years wrote the ``Letter from Paris'' column in the New Yorker under the pen name Genêt.
And there is also the militant lesbian Natalie Barney, whose literary salons were undoubtedly of much greater importance than her own poetry. Natalie Barney was very much in love with Colette, but apparently only had a brief affair with her.
A few other names I remember, who play a more incidental role in the book, are Nancy Cunard (the steamship heiress), Gisele Freund, the photographer, ``HD'' (Hilda Doolittle), the very well known imagist poet, and Marie Laurencin, the famous French painter.
I hope that my comments above haven't given the impression that this is a book of interest primarily to lesbians. It's a book about English-speaking women who were very involved in the literary movements in Paris during the Teens, Twenties, Thirties, and to some extent even into the Forties. I certainly learned a great deal of fascinating things about this literary scene from this book. However one may feel about feminism and women's studies, it is simply a fact that the role women played in the Paris literary scene was absolutely essential, and if one only knows about male authors of the time then one is missing half the picture.
Books on the American Literary Tradition in Paris
Literary Women of the Left Bank