The Barbizon

[An] insightful, well-written account...[Bren] details the lives of some of the Barbizon's most well-known residents, including Molly Brown, Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, and Joan Didion, and provides historical context about midcentury single women, careers, and sex...A must read for anyone interested in the history of 20th-century women's lives, fashion, publishing, and New York. - Library Journal

Varying delectably in cadence, from high-heel tapping and typewriter clacking to sinuous and reflective passages analyzing the complex forms of adversity Barbizon women faced over the decades, Bren's engrossing and illuminating inquiry portrays the original Barbizon as a vital microcosm of the long quest for women's equality. - Booklist

A rare glimpse behind the doors of New York's famous women-only residential hotel...Drawing on extensive research, extant letters, and numerous interviews, Bren beautifully weaves together the political climate of the times and the illuminating personal stories of the Barbizon residents...Elegant prose brings a rich cultural history alive. - Kirkus Reviews

An entertaining and enlightening account of New York's Barbizon Hotel and the role it played in fostering women's ambitions in 20th-century America...Carefully researched yet breezily written, this appealing history gives the Barbizon its rightful turn in the spotlight. - Publishers Weekly

Before Sex and the Single Girl, before "Sex and the City," there was the Barbizon. It was a romantic building with a romantic purpose: It fixed a woman up with her dreams. Paulina Bren has written a stylish, charming history of a unique institution, brimming with aspiration and idiosyncrasy, and one that allowed a woman to survive without either marrying someone or cooking him dinner - even when she was barred from so much as taking a seat at the bar. - STACY SCHIFF, author of The Witches and Pulitzer Prize Winner

Residents of the Barbizon Hotel were once described as 'young women alone.' Thanks to Paulina Bren, they are alone no longer. The Barbizon is a fascinating social history of a forgotten place and time and an intimate portrait of women, trying to find their way in a pre-feminist world. I'll never look at a hotel and think the same way again. - KEITH O'BRIEN, New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls