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."

• 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