Flappers

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something huge. Jazz, racy fashions, eyebrow raising new attitudes about art and sex - all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and stride into the future in one deft, stylized gesture. The women who defined this age - Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka - would presage the sexual revolution by nearly half a century and would shape the role of women for generations to come.

In Flappers, the acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell renders these women with all the color that marked their lives and their era. Both sensuous and sympathetic, her admiring biography lays bare the private lives of her heroines, filling in the bold contours.