Dianna Souhami's new history of 1920s Paris, No Modernism Without Lesbians, focusses on four women -- Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein -- who were at the center of the modernist movement. Beach started the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and published James Joyce's Ulysses. Bryher was a novelist, magazine editor, and heiress who used her fortune to help struggling writers. Barney was a writer and influential salon hostess. Stein was a patron of the arts and avant-garde author. Souhami’s book offers separate biographies of the four women, from birth to death.

Whether Souhami proves that her brash title is literally true misses the point. The point is to examine the undeniable roles these four women played in the modernist movement by sponsoring artists and writers and fostering the modernist community in Paris.

No Modernism Without Lesbians is a fascinating, lively history of Paris in the first half of the 20th Century. Recommended for readers interested in women’s history and books about Paris, art, or literature. ( )