What do a globe-racing journalist, a Parisian jazz-age superstar, a bookshop owner who published \"Ulysses,\" and Hollywood's most unapologetic lesbian playwright have in common? They all refused to play by the rules of their time — and four biographies bring their stories back to life.
In this video I review four books about extraordinary women who carved out space for themselves in a world that wasn't built for them:
Matthew Goodman's \"Eighty Days\" (Ballantine Books, 2013) tells the true story of Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland, two rival journalists who, in 1889, each set out to circle the globe faster than Jules Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg — one heading east, one west, each unaware for weeks that the other even existed. Goodman spent eighteen months in libraries piecing together their contrasting lives, and it shows: this is meticulously researched history with the pacing of an adventure novel, giving equal weight to Bly's scrappy, undercover-reporter grit and the long-forgotten Bisland's genteel brilliance.
Phyllis Rose's \"Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time\" (Doubleday, 1989) situates Baker not just as a performer but as a cultural phenomenon, tracing how a Black American dancer became the toast of 1920s Paris, a French Resistance operative, and later a civil rights activist. Rose reads Baker's constantly reinvented persona as a kind of \"jazz improvisation\" of identity, using her life to unpack how race and femininity were performed differently on either side of the Atlantic.
Sylvia Beach's own memoir, \"Shakespeare and Company\" (1959), is a first-person account from the woman who ran the legendary Left Bank bookshop that became a gathering place for Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein — and who took the enormous risk of publishing Joyce's \"Ulysses\" when no one else would. It's a warm, gossipy, insider's view of the Lost Generation from the woman who quietly made so much of it possible.
Finally, Robert A. Schanke's \"That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta\" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003) is the first full biography of the poet, playwright, and screenwriter who had very public affairs with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Isadora Duncan at a time when that kind of openness could — and did — cost her everything. Schanke digs through archives and interviews to correct the myths around de Acosta and restore her as a genuine pioneer of early lesbian visibility, rather than just a footnote in other people's biographies.
Four very different women, four very different fields — but together these books make the case that the \"Roaring Twenties\" were roaring loudest for the women who refused to stay in the background.
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