Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner

The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genêt. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.

Brenda Wineapple, an English professor at Union College, Schenectady, New York, goes beyond the mast of Genêt to reveal Flanner-no less vivid and ...