Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sylvia Beach
-
Standard Name: Beach, Sylvia
Birth Name: Nancy Woodbridge Beach
Nickname: Sylvia
An American expatriate in Paris, SB
played a key role in the emergence of literary modernism. She wrote important translations of landmark works of modernist literature, edited a collection of critical reviews and a retrospective anthology, and wrote a memoir about her life as the owner of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company
. Before becoming a bookseller, she had aspirations of becoming a war journalist, but only one of her essays was published.
During the 1920s DM
's primary focus was her writing, which she continued mainly in isolation and under much mental and physical stress. However, she was assisted in this by Harriet Shaw Weaver
and Sylvia Beach
Textual Production
Dora Marsden
This journal had an auspicious beginning: Marsden announced in January that it would serialize James Joyce
's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Marsden played an important role in Joyce's early...
Textual Production
Dora Marsden
From 1920 DM
lived in intellectual and social isolation in a small Lake District cottage, concerned almost exclusively with her philosophical reading and writing. Her only regular company was her mother; Harriet Shaw Weaver
sometimes...
Textual Production
Dora Marsden
Formerly stored in a wicker trunk at the home of her niece Elaine Dyson Bate, DM
's papers are now at Princeton University
. Her collection contains manuscripts, papers, and letters to and from Rebecca West
Friends, Associates
Dora Marsden
Marsden and Weaver also developed other significant literary and social relationships through each other. As editor of The Egoist, Marsden was chiefly responsible for the decision to serialize Joyce
's A Portrait of the...
Author summary
James Joyce
Irish exile JJ
, hailed by Yeats
as a new kind of novelist even before his first novel was published, became one of the leading practitioners of modernism. As well as poems, a play, and...
HD's estrangement from Pound
continued for years after the end of the Second World War. Then, despite the disapproval of friends such as Bryher
and Sylvia Beach
, she renewed contact with him in 1960...
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
85
Textual Production
Bryher
Bryher
's Paris 1900, a booklet on her childhood visit to the World Exhibition in that city that year, was published. Drafted in English, it was translated into French and distributed by Sylvia Beach
Cultural formation
Bryher
From an early age, she fostered relationships with such innovative contemporaries as H. D.
, Dorothy Richardson
, Sylvia Beach
, and Marianne Moore
. In her life writings, Bryher places most importance on her...
Friends, Associates
Bryher
Bryher was in some ways an anomaly in the expatriate literary society of Paris: she did not drink or enjoy a life of dissipation. But she loved to take an ancillary role with artists and...
Publishing
Bryher
In her second memoir, Bryher recalls conceiving this war text in October 1940, when she saw a large plaster bulldog
Bryher,. The Days of Mars. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
13
placed on guard beside a pile of rubble after a heavy air raid on...
Publishing
Samuel Beckett
This was published by Sylvia Beach
's Shakespeare and Company
at Paris, and has been several times reprinted.
