SOURCE: Benstock, Shari. “Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier: Rue de L'Odéon.” In Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940, pp. 194-229. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Benstock presents brief overviews of Monnier and Beach's lives, also reviewing the history of their relationship together, both as personal friends and professional colleagues.

One Woman Reading

In May 1938, the owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres at 7, rue de l'Odéon, broadcast over Radio-Paris a “Letter to Listeners.” Adrienne Monnier began her spoken letter with a hypothetical objection from the male listening audience: “‘les Ami-es des Livres’ … they do not exist, of course. Women are incapable of loving books; far from being their friends, they are their natural enemies” (“Les Amies des Livres,” in The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier, 183).¹ More than twenty years earlier, Monnier had opened the first lending library ever established...