SHARI BENSTOCK is Professor of English at the University of Miami (Florida).
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.
*National Public Radio*
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...
*Choice*
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...
*Feminist Bookstore News*
... 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 Through their writings, including unpublished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.
*Publishers Weekly*
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.
*American Literature*
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