These trendsetting lesbian lovers fled 1920s America for Paris and lived their best life
Solita Solano and Janet Flanner, bored with American patriarchy, created their own path
“The Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte was perfect for our purposes,” wrote theater critic Solita Solano of the Parisian establishment where she and her partner Janet Flanner made their home in the 1920s. “It cost a dollar a day, and was near the Seine, the Louvre, and the auto buses.” The pair had come to Paris, according to Solano, to “learn all about art and write our first novels.” But their choice of accommodations wasn’t simply economical. The Napoleon was smack dab in the middle of literary Paris, near the Saint Germain des Pres and the famous Cafe de Flore, where artists and intellectuals hobnobbed over cups of espresso.
The Left Bank of Paris was witnessing the flowering of artistic and sexual experimentation — qualities the pair came to embody — and though many were living on a shoestring, it was worth it to be in the epicenter of such a thriving creativity. Living simply in the pursuit of a joyful, bohemian life of the mind, Solano and Flanner became a defining force in the creative expat scene in Paris.
Before arriving in the French capital, Solano and Flanner had traveled in Greece, en route to Constantinople, where Solano was on assignment for National Geographic. (Fifty years later, looking at a picture of the Parthenon, Flanner would write to Solano, “Thank you for Greece — my great first adventure in illumination.”) The pair, who were alienated from their claustrophobic lives in New York, didn’t make it back to the states — instead, they landed in Paris, where they made a home.
By the time she made it to Paris, Solano was a glamorous global traveler with a severe, slightly asymmetrical black bob and jewel-like blue eyes. But she started her life as Sarah Wilkinson and was raised modestly in Troy, New York, where she attended the well known Emma Willard School and then a stricter school, Sacred Heart Convent, which her conventional parents hoped would tame her wild spirit. According to Brenda Wineapple’s biography of Flanner, Solano “passed her first sixteen years rather gloomily among the Wilkinsons of Troy.”
As a teenager, she married an engineer named Oliver Filley, with whom she traveled to Asia. Over the course of four years, Filley and his young bride spent time in China, Japan, and the Philippines, even becoming members of high society in Manila. But the marriage was unhappy, possibly even violent, and Solano decided to leave. Around this time, she chose to change her given name, which she strongly disliked. She claimed she got the new one from a Spanish grandmother, but Wineapple writes, “there is no record of such a person.”
Solano had begun her career as a reporter for the Boston Herald-Traveler, but was later promoted to drama editor and critic. According to her brief 1975 obituary in the New York Times, Solano was “the first woman to hold such a post” at a major American daily. She eventually became a theater critic at the New York Tribune and freelanced at National Geographic. In Paris, she wanted to focus primarily on fiction writing.
Flanner was friends with Ernest Hemingway, who made a nasty comment about her writing: after reading her piece on bullfighting, he reportedly told her, “Listen, Jan, I just want you to know that if a journalistic prize is ever given for the worst sports writer of the western world, I’m going to see you get it, pal, for you deserve it. You’re perfectly terrible.” But Flanner would go on to prove herself a master of language when she was hired to file a regular “Letter from Paris” column for the New Yorker. The column, which she wrote under the pen name Genet, ran for 50 years. In it, she chronicled everything from the Nazi occupation to the student uprisings in 1968.
Working for the New Yorker in its earliest days under the direction of co-founder Harold Ross — who had already fired three Paris correspondents in the five months of the magazine’s existence — Flanner captured the curiosity and sense of adventure that was the hallmark of the expat sensibility. As the New York Times put it, describing the decades of columns which were collected in three volumes, “Flanner covered art, theater and literature, politics and popular culture, including mini-lessons in French history based on the funerary rituals for both the great and the good — such as Anatole France and Claude Monet — and the mad and the bad, among them Isadora Duncan and La Goulue.” She was known for her obituaries in particular.
With Flanner writing for the New Yorker and serving as the breadwinner, Solano was free to work on the fiction projects that were her passion. Wineapple describes the beginning of the pair’s relationship as a beautifully honest reckoning with lesbian desire. (Both had been married to men.) Solano was an outspoken suffragette who’d even marshaled parades for the women’s vote, and she seemed to possess an organic drive toward personal truth and independence. Flanner was coming off of a pregnancy, about which she’d felt uneasy (it isn’t known whether it ended in abortion or miscarriage, according to her biographer), and was newly committed to following her heart rather than leading the unremarkable middle class life she’d always assumed she would.
They were charter members of the Lucy Stone League, the first group to argue for a woman’s right to keep her own name and identity after marriage. The group’s mission ended up being more significant to the couple than they might have originally thought. Early in their relationship, “clandestine meetings and shared confidences” were balanced with “simple pleasure in each other’s company.” To Flanner, Wineapple writes, Solano seemed “worldly and wise, elegant, lovely, and experienced.” She spoke several languages, had published several stories, and lived alone on East Ninth Street. She was “volatile, intense, often coquettish, warm and articulate,” and Flanner felt she could bare her soul to her. “She and Solita saw in each other a hunger for all that was noble-minded, and they recognized that they both wanted something special from life.”
In Paris, they found it, becoming essential fixtures in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s group. So insular and singular was the city’s literary lesbian scene that modernist writer Djuna Barnes even parodied it in her 1928 sendup Ladies Almanack. The book depicts a mostly same-sex social circle with a charismatic lesbian, Dame Evangeline Musset, at its center. Musset was modeled after the real-life American expat Natalie Clifford Barney, who ran a salon on the Left Bank for 60 years. Solano and Flanner appear in the book — as sisters named Nip and Tuck — as do artist and poet Mina Loy and Radclyffe Hall, author of the famous lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness.
Flanner and Solano made a model bohemian expat life together — decorating their home, according to Wineapple, with “leopard print throws” and flea market treasures, and passed their time having brioche together in a cafe for breakfast, doing errands during the day, and writing in the afternoon and early evening, sometimes departing afterward for a visit to the book stalls and a dinner of couscous and mint tea. They hung out at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookstore, took short vacations to Brittany and Normandy, and entertained friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Flanner’s dispatches became required reading for certain highbrow Americans who wanted to understand the city’s culture. And though Solano never built a strong reputation on her fiction the way she’d dreamed of, her life in Paris was by all accounts satisfying. Years later, Solano left Flanner after Flanner began an affair with an Italian editor, Natalia Danesi Murray. Solano took up with sculptor Elizabeth Jenks Clark. But Flanner and Solano remained a steadily nourishing part of one another’s lives, and their time together stands as a stunning portrait of Left Bank lesbian romance and intellectual productivity. In 1974, almost sixty years after they met, Flanner wrote to Solano, “Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think of you…Yes, you and I have known each other very very long.”
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