No Modernism Without Lesbians Quotes

“in these stories, written with no particular reader in mind, she found the key to freeing the small boy trapped in the wrong body, a salve to the gender quandary that so dismayed her when every expectation was for her to be a girl with curls.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“Sylvia and Adrienne came under Nazi scrutiny. Sylvia was warned of the imminent confiscation of her books. Adrienne was suspect for having written a condemnation of Nazism and anti-Semitism. She helped Gisèle Freund get to Buenos Aires as the guest of Victoria Ocampo, the feminist Argentine writer who founded the literary journal Sur, and in May 1940 she hid Walter Benjamin and Arthur Koestler in her apartment. Koestler, who had been imprisoned in Spain for airing anti-fascist views, was writing Darkness at Noon.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“the glory days of Shakespeare and Company were done. Its demise marked the end of the exuberance and freedom of modernist innovation. Old-style masculine domination steamrollered in with murder, repression, punishment and with winning defined by who best killed and destroyed. Sylvia talked of the ‘insanity’ of war. Samuel Beckett said she had a permanent worried look. ‘Everyone in Paris wants to flee to America away from wars and dictators,’ Sylvia wrote to her father. Bryher assured her that whatever happened to Shakespeare and Company, she would look after her. ‘I tried always to do what I could for the real artists and especially for the woman artist,’ she said. These women artists were lesbian.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“No New York newspaper came to their defence or spoke out for Joyce.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“Harold Monro, with his Poetry Bookshop at 35 Devonshire Street in Bloomsbury, was a mentor and inspiration. In 1913 he had turned an eighteenth-century house into a shop, publishing house and meeting place for poets and readers. At his own expense he published poetry and edited The Poetry Review. The shop was on the ground floor. The poet Amy Lowell called it a room rather than a shop. There was a coal fire, comfortable chairs, a cat and a couple of dogs. Offices were on the first floor, poetry readings were held on the second, and at the top were two attic rooms for poets and artists who needed cheap lodgings.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians

“Modernism sent fissures through a whole bundle of myths: that a narrative must have a beginning, a middle and an end, and romance be between a hero and heroine; that art should be representative and music follow familiar notations. The modernist movement questioned orthodoxies: that God made the world in seven days, that Christ was the Son of God, parented by a virgin and a ghost, that there were tangible domains of heaven and hell, that kings were in their palaces by divine right, that man was king of all species, and that war was an acceptable way of resolving conflict between nations.”
― Diana Souhami, No Modernism Without Lesbians