QUEENS OF BOHEMIA (AND OTHER MISS-FITS)

Artist and chronicler of Soho and Fitzrovia’s cultural history Darren Coffield (Tales from the Colony Room) presents a selection of women who ruled London’s Bohemia from the 1920s onwards, the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending ‘Flapper’ who inspired the creation of Soho’s Gargoyle Club, a nocturnal hunting ground for femmes fatales. Ruling this Bohemian milieu were ‘Queen of Clubs’ Kate Meyrick, the taboo-breaking ‘Tiger Woman’ Betty May, the original ‘Chelsea Girl’ Viva King, the 'Euston Road Venus’ artist Nina Hamnett, Sonia Orwell and artist, model, muse, spy and pornographer Isabel Rawsthorne, to name but a few.

Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one’s self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.

Host or Publisher Pimlico Library