Women of the Left Bank by Shari Benstock

The author claims that the contributions of two dozen American and English expatriate women—writers, publishers, booksellers, “salonieres???to the life of literary Paris between 1900 and 1940, “nurtured the development of literary Modernism’s powerful culture”. This detailed examination of the lives and works of these women, along with the ???misogyny, homophobia, and antiSemitism that indelibly mark Modernism??, challenges and re-interprets many of the prevailing myths about the lives of Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Jean Rhys, Edith Wharton, Bryher, Nancy Cunard, and many others.