Janet Flanner  (Genêt) (1892 - 1978)

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Janet, My Mother, and Me : A Memoir of Growing Up With Janet Flanner and Natalia Danesi Murray by William Murray

William Murray, a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than 30 years and author of more than 20 books, had the good fortune to be raised by a couple who loved one another intensely and doted on him completely. That the couple was composed of two remarkable and remarkably independent women who happened to be lovers didn't faze Murray in the least, despite the prevailing social winds of the '40s and '50s. That those two women were Natalia Danesi Murray (his mother) and Janet Flanner, The New Yorker's celebrated author of the "Letter from Paris" column, added indescribable richness to his life and helped inspire him towards his own career as a writer.

In this winning memoir, Murray narrates the life story of his mother (born in Rome, she would develop a diverse career that included freelance writer, radio broadcaster, actress, and publishing big wheel--a woman he describes as "an explosive force of nature"); his maternal grandmother, Mammina Ester (who lived with them and had herself been a journalistic and literary firebrand in Italy, and during WWI was the first Italian female war correspondent to ever visit a front); and Janet Flanner, who wrote under the pseudonym Genêt and was lauded in Mary McCarthy's elegy as a "first citizen and patron of the arts, with some mythic quality in her like a splendid sacred bird."

Murray tells his life story as well, growing up in New York and Italy, his life imbued with the fine arts of two cultures and the three women who raised him and molded him. His memoir is at once a movingly personal story, a revelation into the persona of three historic women, and an insight into how lesbians navigated their professional worlds and a disapproving society while maintaining a family life and a passion for one another. It's also a pleasant, gentle read, a story told in a genial tone about an earlier time. The individuals Murray describes are luminous personalities, and the reader feels privileged to share in their glow through the pages of this touching memoir. --Stephanie Gold

Genet : A Biography of Janet Flanner by Brenda Wineapple

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 complex than Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, and other American expatriates who crossed her path.

"A triumph. . . . How Brenda Wineapple understood Genêt and her times is almost uncanny. She writes of them with clarity and accuracy in a style that is almost startling in its simplicity." —Kay Boyle

"Wineapple has written a wonderfully perceptive and moving biography of Janet Flanner. I hated to finish it." —May Sarton 

"A good book to read at this time, with Europe once again undergoing kaleidoscopic change. At her best, Janet Flanner vividly described what we all must remember if history is not to repeat itself." —Newsday 

"The strength of this book rests in the intelligence of its observations. The author never struts or postures as a pop psychologist. She never snips and reduces character so that portrait becomes caricature. . . .Wineapple delivers this woman in the splendor of her complication." —Mirabella  

"An admirable biography of an interesting woman who did interesting work in interesting times. Wineapple has done an exemplary job of weaving. . .a narrative that is. . .smooth as silk." —Trenton Times. 

Women Come to the Front:  Janet Flanner

Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During World War II

From the Library of Congress

Excerpt:

Perennial columnist for The New Yorker magazine, Janet Flanner (1892-1978) produced trenchant commentary on European politics and culture. In her mid twenties, Flanner left the United States for Paris, quickly becoming part of the group of American writers and artists who lived in the city between the world wars. In October 1925 Flanner published her first "Letter from Paris" in the then brand-new magazine, The New Yorker, launching a professional association destined to last for five decades.

Flanner's work during World War II included not only her famous "Letter from Paris" (disrupted for a period) and seminal pieces on Hitler's rise (1936) and the Nuremburg trials (1945), but a series of little-known weekly radio broadcasts for the NBC Blue Network during the months following the liberation of Paris in late 1944...

Janet Tyler Flanner 

From The Knitting Circle

Excerpt:

In 1918 she married William Lane Rehm, a friend that she had made while at the University of Chicago. He was an artist in New York City and she admitted that she married him to get out of Indianapolis. The marriage lasted for only a few years and they divorced amicably in 1926.

Also in 1918 she met Solita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson) in Greenwich Village and they became life-long lovers, although not monogamous. Solita Solano was drama editor for the New York Tribune and also wrote for the National Geographic magazine. The two women are portrayed as Nip and Tuck in Ladies Almanack, (1928), by Djuna Barnes. While in New York Janet Flanner moved in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table...

Women in American History:  Janet Flanner

From Encyclopedia Britannica 

Excerpt:

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on March 13, 1892, Janet Flanner was the child of Quakers. She attended the University of Chicago in 1912-14 and then returned to Indianapolis and took a job with the Indianapolis Star, becoming the paper's first movie critic in 1916. After a brief marriage and a sojourn in New York City, she traveled through Europe, eventually settling in Paris in 1922. She lived there until 1975 (except for the war years 1939-44). A friend of Harold Ross, she was hired by him in 1925 to write a periodic "Letter from Paris" for his new magazine, The New Yorker. Signed by "Genêt," the articles contained observations on politics, art, theater, French culture, and various personalities...

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