Benstock 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 Through their writings, including unpublished and newly available documentary sources of the period, Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton and others are revealed as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 often 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. .'What was it like to be a woman in literary Paris?'' That city's Left Bank, says the author, was in the early part of the 20th century 'inhabited by all those on the margin of culture, a place for the dislocated, even the dispossessed.' Among these expatriates were women writers, editors, poets, journalists, and novelists who came to Paris from America or England, often to escape a family or society that made it hard for them to live as a lesbian or a black woman--or simply as an intelligent, ambitious person uninterested in settling into traditional domestic life.