In this section Beach describes her experiences in occupied Paris, when she closed down the bookstore after refusing to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a German officer. The final section is particularly moving. However, it picks up again when Beach recounts how the bookstore was saved from closure during the 1930s by the efforts of French and expatriate literary figures.

The middle section of the book is somewhat bogged down in an account of less well-known writers and somewhat obscure literary reviews with which Beach was associated. Joyce must have been extraordinarily frustrating to deal with, but nothing more than a hint of exasperation emerges from Beach's account of their friendship.īeach has a clear and accessible conversational style. This was ultimately to her financial disadvantage. Beach, who was devoted to Joyce and recognised his literary genius, not only published the book, but acted as Joyce's agent, secretary, banker and adviser. This was in 1922, at a time when Joyce could not secure a publisher because the book had been banned in the US and the UK following its publication in periodical form. In addition to running her bookstore, Sylvia Beach published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses in book form. Instead, the image of Beach which emerges from the work is of a modest, warm, devoted, patient, principled, persistent and humourous woman, who was loyal to her friends and committed to promoting contemporary literature. Unlike Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, Beach was not mean spirited, nor was she self-obsessed as Gertrude Stein demonstrated herself to be in The Autobiography of Alice B. While not at all literary - Beach had no pretensions to be a writer and in the memoir describes herself as a 'plain reader' - the work comes across as honest and heartfelt.

During that period, her store was a hub for expatriate writers including Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fizgerald and, most signficantly, James Joyce. Beach was an American woman who operated an English language lending library and bookstore called Shakespeare & Company on Paris' Left Bank from 1919 to 1941*. The third book read in my project to learn more about literary expatriates in 1920s and 1930s Paris, Sylvia Beach's memoir was in many ways the most enjoyable reading experience to date.

Shakespeare and company by sylvia beach