No Modernism Without Lesbians

The 1895 trial and ruin of Oscar Wilde hung in the air of English society. Sex between consenting women was not illegal. Silence was the weapon of its repression.

what matters from A to Z is not what you are, but how you are what you are, and the contribution made.

I cannot talk about cisgender for Virginia Woolf, call Bryher they, or struggle with No Modernism Without QUILTBAG+. And all the initials in the alphabet will not help in what I hope shines through: the uniqueness, the utter singularity of each individual life.

Sylvia Beach started the bookshop Shakespeare and Company and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no commercial publisher could or would. Bryher, born Winifred Ellerman, daughter of the richest man in England, used her inheritance to fund new writing and film. Natalie Barney aspired to live her life as a work of art and make Paris the sapphic cent

Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein – three were American, one was English.

In the decades before the Second World War, many creative women who loved women fled the repressions and expectations of their home towns, such as Washington and London, and formed a like-minded community in Paris.