Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)

·39 min·3 clips

Diana Souhami explains how writing lesbian biographies became her personal act of coming out.

The conversation settles in Paris. The guest and host talk through a literary scene that depended on talent, yes, but also on low rents, cheap food, and the luck of having people close by. Sylvia Beach is near the center of it. Shakespeare and Company is not treated like a postcard-famous bookshop. It is a lending library, a place to find books, a source of money when writers needed help, and a room where the work could keep going. The tone stays scholarly without getting stiff. The host keeps tugging the talk back to ordinary logistics: how these women lived, where they gathered, who helped whom, and what made the scene possible day after day. Ulysses matters, and not politely. Beach is remembered as its publisher, but also as the person whose shop pulled in writers who could not get the book elsewhere. Prohibition gets its own dry laugh. The guest connects American writers' pull toward Paris with blocked access to Ulysses and the plain fact that they could drink there. Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald enter the orbit around Shakespeare and Company, though the episode keeps its weight on Beach and the women around her. Renaming becomes one of the sharper threads. Sylvia Beach renamed herself, and the host links that to another woman born Annie Winifred. The point lands quietly: self-naming was personal, but it also had teeth. The closing softens into haircuts, Cornwall, a studio, and a promised memoir. Literary history gives way to the author's working life, without losing the thread.

As heard by us

A warm book conversation where Sylvia Beach's shop maps literary life and self-invention.

Yana Byers frames the episode around the social machinery of literary Paris: low rents, cheap food, and the circle that formed around Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company.

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Why you'd press play

You get Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, and a careful turn into women choosing new names.

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