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Loading... The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnierby Adrienne Monnier
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"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" "... 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 Through their writings, including unpublished and newly available documentary sources of the period, Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and others are revealed as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." "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..." "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."
In 1920s Paris, Adrienne Monnier provided a focal point for the writers and artists drawn to the Left Bank. Her bookstore in the Rue de l'Odeon was aptly called La Maison des Amis des Livres. Monnier took a simple though sophisticated delight in language, books, art, music, nature, friendship, and food. Her 1940 journal, written as Paris fell to the Germans and originally published in 1976, is a rich tapestry of essays, reviews, and personal recollections. She goes to lunch with Colette, visits T. S. Eliot, befriends Joyce, argues with Breton, takes walks with Gide, publishes her elegant reviews, and reflects on the ballet, opera, Steinberg drawings, Marlon Brando and Alec Guinness movies, and the country of her birth. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)840.9Literature French and related languages French literature History, descriptionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.5)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
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Monnier had a French bookshop on the Rue de l'Odeon. She and Beach were probably lovers, they lived together for many years and remained life-long friends when Beach moved out. Beach was the first to publish James Joyce's Ulysses. In English. Monnier was the first to have it translated and to publish it in French.
Beach wrote a lovely memoir titled Shakespeare and Co. where she tells about her bookshop and all those who came to it. This book is a compilation of Monnier's writings, also about her own bookshop, her publications, and all those who came to her bookshop and whom she knew. As much as I loved the Beach book, her writing is terse and she is very, maybe too discrete. Monnier's writing I found to be more elegant, more detailed, and more varied in its subject matter. Monnier was the first to publish anything by Antoine de Saint-Exupery In addition to the poets and writers whom she knew well, she wrote about musicians, artists, singers, and actors. There are pieces about Maurice Chevalier, Vittorio de Sica and some of his films, Alec Guinness, Marlon Brando, and Ernest Hemingway when he came to liberate the Rue de l'Odeon the day after the German surrender. (