NO MODERNISM WITHOUT LESBIANS

A study of the anti-patriarchal women who played essential roles in the development of 20th-century modernism.

Souhami focuses on four women, and their Parisian community, who combined to create a "revolutionary force" in the fight to break away from 19th-century norms in the art world: Sylvia Beach, who founded Shakespeare and Company bookstore and published Ulysses in 1922; Bryher (born Annie Winifred Ellerman), a novelist and influential arts patron who funded modern writing and film; Natalie Barney, whose intimate circle became "the sapphic centre of the Western world”; and Gertrude Stein, who “furthered the careers of modernist painters and writers and broke the mould of English prose.” Though not all identified as lesbian, all had women lovers. Life partners and many torrid affairs add up to quite a cast of characters, including portrait artist Romaine Brooks and author Djuna Barnes. Beach's support of modernist literature, most notably Joyce, was crucial. Bryher, who "felt trapped in the wrong body," was "a rock" for her partner, the poet H.D. Barney, who proudly declared herself a lesbian and was "transparent about same-sex desire in a repressed and repressive age." Ironically, Stein, whose achievements in modernism were the greatest of the four, was the most traditional in her domestic life with Alice B. Toklas, the "wife for me.” Souhami effectively shows how "lesbians of the era, to flourish in their self-styled lives, needed to free themselves from domination by men,” but too much of the book describes those very relations—e.g., Beach and Joyce. Still, the author keeps the life stories lively, and because everyone in avant-garde Paris knew each other (many through love affairs), the four narratives often intersect in interesting ways. Souhami presents these readable biographies in a series of bite-sized portions, each with its own catchy header, and the author displays a talent for choosing intriguing quotes from her subjects. For example, from the "energetically polyamorous" Barney: "I am a lesbian. One need not hide it nor boast of it, though being other than normal is a perilous advantage."

A fresh perspective on modernism.