In December 1941, the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company closed its doors. The legend is that the shop closed after its founder Sylvia Beach refused to sell the last copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. When the officer threatened to confiscate her entire inventory, Beach quickly hid her books in an upstairs apartment. Soon after, she was detained and interned at Vittel for six months until her release in early 1942. Although Ernest Hemingway ‘personally liberated’ the shop when Paris was freed from Nazi rule in 1944, the beloved prewar bookshop had gone forever. It was reopened under new ownership in a new location in 1951.

Born Nancy Woodbridge in 1887 in Baltimore, Maryland, Beach was born into a family deeply rooted in religious tradition. Her father, Sylvester Beach, was a Presbyterian minister, and her maternal grandparents had been missionaries to India. Several generations of clergymen shaped her paternal lineage. Beach would take a very different path. After the family relocated to France when her father was appointed as an assistant minister at the American Church in Paris, they returned to the United States in 1906. Beach, however, continued to explore Europe, working as an agricultural labourer in France during the First World War and with the Balkan Commission of the Red Cross. She returned to Paris in 1916, where she would settle permanently.

Opening a bookshop had long been Beach’s dream and she toyed with the idea of opening one in New York or London. But it was in Paris that she met and fell in love with Adrienne Monnier, owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres – who would become Beach’s romantic and professional partner. (Fittingly for Beach, the poet Jules Romains described Monnier as ‘a girl with a round, rosy face, with blue eyes, with blond hair, who, it appeared all at once, had just entered the service of literature as others decide to enter the service of religion’) In 1919, she asked her mother for money to open Shakespeare and Company, writing simply: ‘Please send money. Opening bookshop in Paris.’ Beach’s mother obliged. A few months later, armed with enough cash and Monnier’s support, she opened Shakespeare and Company in November of the same year at the age of 32 – then a small lending library located at 8 rue Dupuytren on Paris’s Left Bank.

In its early years, the bookshop thrived as a hub for writers, artists, and intellectuals – chiefly, those of the avant-garde. Its modest collection at the time included English poetry and various literary magazines – all arranged without a catalogue or index to guide visitors. Beach also secured a pair of drawings by William Blake and photographs of writers she admired, including Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar Allan Poe. No doubt the shop’s setup was haphazard – a veritable kunstkammer of all Beach’s favourite things. This only made the space more appealing to disillusioned expats from the United States in search of sanctuary. The bookshop became a hostel, a meeting place, clubhouse, post office, and reading room. More than that: it gave them a home away from home.

W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Joyce, and Hemingway were among Shakespeare and Company’s frequent patrons. And so were Man Ray, Djuna Barnes, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, George Gershwin, and Paul Valéry, to name just a few of them. But for all this pedigree of talent, Beach’s clientele wasn’t particularly wealthy. To keep herself and the shop afloat, Beach decided to supplement her income by lending books for a small fee. She affectionately referred to her regulars as ‘bunnies’, a playful nod to the French word for subscriber, ‘abonné’.

Both Beach and Monnier were central figures in the Left Bank’s circle of lesbians, which included Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. Shari Benstock described the two as polar opposites: ‘Adrienne was plump and motherly; Sylvia, like Alice Toklas, was small and wiry.’ Their shops were just as dissimilar; while Shakespeare and Company catered to bohemians and freethinkers, La Maison des Amis des Livres, perched on the same street, was comparatively more subdued. Still, together the two women transformed the Left Bank and rue de l’Odéon into Paris’s literary centre – so much so, that it was jokingly referred to as the ‘Stratford-on-Odéon’ or, by critic Cyril Connolly, as the ‘sacred rue de l’Odéon’. To his mind, they were ‘two bilingual sirens who have so long enchanted us with all that is best in two literatures’.

Despite Beach’s friendship with established figures such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, she continued to champion experimental literature. Notably, she was also the first publisher willing to publish Joyce’s Ulysses. Clearly, Beach had understood the magnitude of what she had in her possession, prophesying in a 1921 letter that Ulysses would make Shakespeare and Company famous. By this time Joyce had already published Dubliners, and the semi-autobiographical künstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, written at a time of unprecedented literary and artistic upheaval. But still no publishers would touch Ulysses. A novel about the formlessness of lived experience was, in any case, a hard sell. This, coupled with its polymorphic, dense prose deemed the book unmarketable to the general reader. Owing to its explicit sexual content, Joyce was also facing censorship issues in the United States and an obscenity trial following its serialised publication in The Little Review.

Still, Beach decided to publish Ulysses anyway: a task as laborious as it was generous. The first edition contained no less than 2,000 errors, many deliberately conjured up by Joyce himself to test the reader. She fought with printers to give Joyce more time to revise his manuscript and asked Hemingway to help smuggle copies out of France. ‘Daily, he boarded the ferry, a copy of Ulysses stuffed down inside his pants,’ she recalls in her memoir. But it was worth it in the end; the book became not only synonymous with Dublin itself but also hailed as one of the greatest novels ever written. Eliot praised the book as one ‘to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape’.

All was well until the ripple effects of the Great Depression hit Paris, marking the end of Shakespeare and Company’s golden years. After years of championing Joyce’s work, Beach found the financial strain of continuing to publish Ulysses too great. (As she once told Joyce, ‘my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders.’) Until 1933, she had handled the book’s publication rights and distribution herself, before passing these responsibilities to Joyce, who then sold the rights to an American publisher. Although the two were estranged by then, Beach’s affection for the work remained unwavering, writing fondly that ‘a baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife, doesn’t it?’ By 1941, Paris was under German occupation and Beach would, infamously, refuse to sell the shop’s last remaining copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. In his biography on the lives of Paris’s American expats under Nazi occupation, the writer Charles Glass quotes Beach saying: ‘In the Gestapo would come and they’d say, “You have a Jewish girl – you had – in the bookshop. And you have a black mark against you.” I’d say “Okay, okay.” And they said, “We’ll come for you, you know.” I always said okay to them. One day, they did come.’

Once free from the Vittel, Beach returned to Paris and began work on her memoir, the aptly named Shakespeare and Company. It concludes in 1944 with her account of witnessing the Liberation of Paris from her home on the rue de l’Odéon. Amid the tumult, she hears someone calling her name – a booming voice she recognised as Hemingway’s. She rushed downstairs, and they met with an embrace; he lifted her up, spun her around, and kissed her, as cheers erupted from those watching. According to Beach, Hemingway and his group then took care of the German snipers on Adrienne’s roof before departing in their jeeps, off ‘to liberate the cellar at the Ritz’.

Although Beach’s shop had closed during the war, Monnier’s remained open. She continued her work as an essayist, translator, and bookseller – even as her health declined. In September 1954, she was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease – an inner ear disorder that affects balance and hearing – and started to have delusions. After years of torment from the disease, she died by suicide in 1955 from an overdose of sleeping pills.

Beach had only modest means in her later years but she was still celebrated for publishing Ulysses and for her unwavering support of emerging writers. In 1962, she was invited to Dublin to open the Martello Tower in Sandycove – the setting of Ulysses’ first scene – as a museum. The trip was a chance to reconnect with the book and her memory of Joyce, back at the very place where the novel begins. Architect Michael Scott, who bought the tower in 1954, had campaigned alongside locals such as John Ryan, Niall Sheridan, and Flann O’Brien to honour Joyce as a cultural hero. Beach, too, would be remembered for her legacy, not only as Joyce’s patron but as a cultural figure of note, a feminist, a lesbian, and a central figure in the modernist movement. She died only a few months after her Dublin visit.

As it stands now, Shakespeare and Company opened in 1951 under the name Le Mistral. George Whitman, its American founder, would later rename it in homage to Sylvia Beach’s original bookshop two years after her death. Today the shop is lovingly maintained by Whitman’s daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman, still a cultural bastion of Paris’s literary scene.

Beyond Ulysses, perhaps Beach’s greatest contribution to culture is just this: fashioning a space for writers to think, experiment, create, and collaborate. Hemingway likewise remembered her as a social creature in A Moveable Feast: ‘kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me’. A key tastemaker in her own right, we should remember Beach in similar terms: brazen, determined, and above all else, someone who was willing to risk it all.