The Great Good Place: American Expatriate Women in Paris

From the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, Paris was that good place - the only place, it seemed, where an American woman of strong feeling, of artistic ambition of wayward impulse or sheer joie de vivre could be wholly herself. William Wiser draws portraits of five American women who made Paris their home: painter Mary Cassatt, novelist Edith Wharton, those mercurial gadabouts and tragic wives, Zelda Fitzgerald and Caresse Crosby, and the one and only Josephine Baker. Here also are fascinating cameos of Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Sara Murphy and other luminaries, all set against and shaped by the spell of the City of Light. Paris meant possibilities. These five had utterly different responses to this freedom - but as Wiser shows, the web of connections among them was strong and Paris was its centre.