"In the States, celibacy had never been my strong suit. In Paris, it was a crime against nature—a mortal sin." With this perspicacious analysis of her new city, Henrietta Adams—recently escaped from Utah, via Radcliffe, and freshly appointed as the art correspondent for En Vogue magazine—sets out to discover the literary, artistic, and more unmentionable pleasures of Paris in the 1920s.

Welcomed with open arms by Gertrude Stein (and somewhat more soberly by Alice B. Toklas), Henri meets the luminaries of expatriate society—Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Bryher, Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney, Ernest Hemingway—and unleashes her Yankee curiosity, only to find herself entangled in the mysterious (albeit fraudulent) dealings of the art world and the shackles of Paris's sapphic underground.

"It's a delight to follow Henri Adams on her sapphic adventures..." —Shari Benstock, author of Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940

MARGARET VANDENBURG is Associate Director of the Writing Program at Barnard College of Columbia University.