Portrait
Adrienne Monnier
Born
26 April 1892Paris, France
Died
19 June 1955Paris, France · aged 63
Bookseller and publisherFrance

Adrienne Monnier

Her bookshop on the rue de l’Odéon was the heart of literary Paris – and across the street lived and worked her partner, Sylvia Beach.

Adrienne Monnier was born in Paris, the daughter of a postal worker. At 17 she went to London, officially to improve her English, in reality to be close to a classmate with whom she was “very much in love”. Back in Paris she worked as a teacher and literary secretary. When her father received compensation after a train accident, he gave it all to her so that she could open a bookshop.

In November 1915, in the middle of the First World War, she opened La Maison des Amis des Livres at 7 rue de l’Odéon, one of the first bookshops in France founded by a woman. It became a meeting place for writers such as André Gide, Paul Valéry and Jules Romains.

In 1917 the young American Sylvia Beach came into her shop. The two women fell in love and lived together for many years. Monnier encouraged Beach to open her own English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, which from 1921 stood opposite her own. Together the two shops became the centre of literary modernism in Paris. Monnier published the French translation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1929 and founded the review “Le Navire d’Argent”, which printed T. S. Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway in French for the first time.

Monnier kept her shop open during the German occupation. In her last years she suffered from Ménière’s disease and severe ill health. On 19 June 1955 she took her own life in Paris, aged 63. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or to a crisis line in your country.

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