NYTimes, 4.19.10: Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness

From today's NYTimes, a wonderful review of a new book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  Ms. Beach is the probably one of the most important figure in what we've come to call Modern Literature and, perhaps most famously, published James Joyce's Ulysses.  This was her "crowd"

Joyce, Stein, Pound Hemingway Fitzgerald and H.D. and many others. 

Beach was an unlikely champion of literary modernism. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was the second of three daughters and grew up in Bridgeton and Princeton, N.J. She didn’t attend college but saw the world, working during World War I as a volunteer agricultural laborer in France and then as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. She was plucky. One letter home from Belgrade describes a springlike day ruined by the “bomby” air.

She was a bibliophile from an early age and debated opening a bookstore in New York or London. But in Paris she met and fell in love with a bookstore owner, Adrienne Monnier, who would become, Ms. Walsh writes in her introduction, “her lifelong personal and professional partner.” (This book’s dust jacket speaks of these women’s complicated “affair,” an odd phrase for a decades-long relationship. That phrase also goes farther than Beach does; she was reserved about her sexuality, and these letters are quite chaste.)

[more]