Women of the Left Bank
Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's early years.
This ambitious historical, biographical, and critical study has taken its place among the foremost works of literary criticism. Maurice Beebe calls it "a distinguished contribution to modern literary history." Jane Marcus hails it as "the first serious literary history of the period and its women writers, making along the way no small contribution to our understanding of the relationships between women artists and their male counterparts, from Henry James to Hemingway, Joyce, Picasso, and Pound."
Shari Benstock... weaves together, with great skill, the histories of an extraordinary group of talented women--publishers like Sylvia Beach, Caresse Crosby, Margaret Anderson, and Jane Heap, novelists Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Wharton. She examines in some depth the writing produced by poets, journalists and novelists, thus combining literary criticism and social history in a seamless running narrative.... A valuable and intriguing book.
Benstock has made visible the women of the Left Bank (1900-40) and in doing so has forced a redefinition of what literary modernism was, who was important in it, and how it is to be defined.... Modernism as we will understand it for a long time to come will be defined by Benstock's book...
Women of the Left Bank is perhaps the most exciting book I’ve held in my hands all fall. It details and describes the lives (and relationships) of a community of women in Paris (1900-1940) that strongly parallels the feminist writing, publishing, thought-shaking community of our own times...
... presents the women who left their enduring mark on the cultural milieu of a nation. Through their writings, including unpublished and newly available documentary sources of the period, Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and others are revealed as significant in the development of modernism, imagism and other avant-garde movements in which they were overshadowed or ignored by their male counterparts.... Benstock tracks the sexually liberated lifestyles and the creative originality of these women with a wealth of documentation.
Superbly crafted, at once painstaking and daring, this book will make it impossible to consider Modernism henceforth apart from the important and problematic work of such American women as Gertrude Stein, H.D., Mina Loy, and Djuna Barnes, as well as the various contributions of Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, and others.... The book is an inspiration, setting a standard for literary history and feminist criticism that will be difficult to surpass.
- Preface
- Part I. Discoveries
- 1. Women of the Left Bank
- 2. Secret Passages: The Faubourg St. Germain
- 3. Simultaneous Existences: Four Lives in St. Germain
- 4. From the Left Bank to the Upper East Side: Janet Flanner's Letter from Paris
- Part II. Settlements
- 5. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: Rue de Fleurus
- 6. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier: Rue de l'Odéon
- 7. Djuna Barnes: Rue St.-Romain
- 8. Natalie Barney: Rue Jacob
- Part III. Crossroads
- 9. H. D. and Bryher: En passant
- 10. At the Sign of the Printing Press: The Role of Small Presses and Little Magazines
- 11. Paris Transfer: The 1930s
- 12. The City They Left
- Notes
- Works Cited and Consulted
- Index
