By Elodie Barnes | On May 30, 2022 | Updated July 8, 2025 | Comments (2)
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900 – 1948) is best known as the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and for being the first true Jazz Age flapper in the 1920s. She was also a talented painter and dancer, as well as a writer in her own right. Here, we’ll explore Save Me the Waltz and other writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, which certainly deserve a fresh look.
Struggling first against the excesses of her own Roaring Twenties lifestyle and then battling mental illness, Zelda never achieved the critical success of her husband nor had the chance to fully develop her skills. According to her daughter Frances (Scottie) Fitzgerald:
“It was my mother’s misfortune to have been born with the ability to write, to dance, and to paint, and then never to have acquired the discipline to make her talent work for, rather than against, her.” Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On April 10, 2022 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Simone de Beauvoir first met the French author Violette Leduc in 1945. At the time, de Beauvoir and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre were the golden couple of Parisian intellectual circles, while Violette Leduc was a struggling writer mired in poverty.
Their first meeting, in the heady atmosphere of the Café Flore on the Left Bank, came only after Leduc had observed de Beauvoir and Sartre from a distance for several months, gathering the courage to introduce herself.
The resulting friendship seemed unlikely. Yet it lasted for several years, with mutual respect and admiration that survived Leduc’s unrequited attraction to de Beauvoir as well as the differing circumstances of the two women and their wildly diverging experiences of success. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On February 21, 2022 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Alice Guy-Blaché (July 1, 1873 – March 24, 1968) was a pioneering filmmaker of the early days of cinema, and the first woman to direct a film. One of the first filmmakers to make a narrative film, she was the only known female filmmaker in the world from 1896 to 1906.
Guy-Blaché directed, produced, or supervised about a thousand films, many of them short. When she died in 1968, many of her accomplishments had been erased from male-dominated film history books, but recent years have seen a revival of interest in her life and work. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On January 8, 2022 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who spent much of her career writing as Paris correspondent for The New Yorker.
Under the pen name Gênet, she authored the magazine’s “Letter from Paris” for almost fifty years.
She was a prominent member of the expatriate community that settled in Paris between two World Wars, and made her home there until 1975, after which she returned to New York. Portrait at right, Janet Flanner in 1940 (National Portrait Gallery).
Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On December 1, 2021 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (1)
Janet Flanner (1892 – 1978) was an American writer and journalist, best known for her fifty-year stint as The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent. Writing under the pen name Genêt, she became synonymous with the inter-war expatriate scene in Paris, and her prose style epitomized and influenced the magazine’s journalism to such an extent that it came to be known as “The New Yorker style.”
Over the years, her work for the magazine extended far beyond Paris into broader European politics and culture, encompassing a regular “London letter” and several one-off pieces from a war-scarred Germany.
Her legacy was such that even she was forced to acknowledge, towards the end of her life, that she had created “the form which all other foreign letters consolidated by copying my copy…” and Glenway Westcott called her “the foremost remaining expatriate writer of the Twenties.” Read More→
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