Adrienne Monnier

Adrienne Monnier opened the first bookshop in France run by a woman, published the French Ulysses, and was Sylvia Beach's partner for nearly forty years. She was the daughter of a postal worker who was injured in a railway accident and used the compensation to set his daughter up; she opened La Maison des Amis des Livres in the rue de l'Odeon in 1915, at twenty-three, as a bookshop and lending library at a moment when Paris had almost no such thing for contemporary writing. Gide, Valery, Claudel, Aragon, Breton and Benjamin read there; Walter Benjamin translated in her back room. Beach came in as a customer in 1917, opened Shakespeare and Company across the street two years later on Monnier's advice, and the two shops functioned as one operation for two decades - Monnier lent Beach money, staff and nerve during the Ulysses publication, and in 1929 she published the French translation herself, done by Auguste Morel with Valery Larbaud and checked by Joyce. She edited two literary reviews, wrote essays and a memoir, and translated. The shops survived the occupation in reduced form; Beach was interned, and Monnier kept going. She developed Meniere's disease in her last years, which caused unbearable auditory hallucinations, and killed herself in 1955 leaving a note saying she was doing it in full possession of her faculties. Her shop and Beach s faced each other across a street that was renamed rue de l Odeon in the guidebooks as the odeonie. She published a journal called Le Navire d Argent that printed the first French Prufrock. Beach survived her by seven years.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history