Women of the Left Bank

The expatriate experience for American literati in Paris in the earlier part of this century is usually associated with male writers such as Hemingway, Joyce and Pound. In a reassessment of the period and the prevailing one-sided view of it, Benstock, editor of the journal Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 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 Through their writings, including unpublished and newly available documentary sources of the period, Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and others are revealed as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. Not only were their experiences different from those of their male counterparts, but they were also distinct from each other. Benstock tracks the sexually liberated lifestyles and the creative originality of these women with a wealth of documentation. (December)