The hard work, side by side with the strong, no nonsense women of the Touraine, suited Sylvia’s character (she could never shake off her Victorian upbringing, although the piety and religious beliefs of her father left her unconvinced and conflicted). Cyprien was by then a successful actress in France and Sylvia, staying with her in her apt in Port Royal, decided to help the war effort by joining the Volontaires Agricoles in the Touraine, picking grapes and grafting trees. Her mother Eleanor, unhappy in her marriage, and always eager to be back in Europe, made several trips back to France, without her husband but with her daughters. In 1907, Sylvia returned to Paris and then on to Italy where she studied for a year. After three years, the Beach family returned to Princeton. The Reverend Sylvester Beach’s piety did not rub off on his wife Eleanor who encouraged her daughters to travel and imbued in them her own love of Europe, and for Sylvia in particular, her love of Paris. He was accompanied by his wife Eleanor and their three daughters, Holly, Eleanor (who called herself Cyprian) and Nancy, who preferred to be called Sylvia. Sylvia first saw Paris in 1902 when her father, the Reverend Sylvester Beach, came to assist the Reverend Thurber with the Presbyterian ministry for Americans in Paris. Small and slender, Sylvia had– according to Hemingway- “a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears.” Hemingway also approved of her pretty legs, writing that she was, “kind and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip.” The original Shakespeare and Company was opened in rue Dupuytren in 1921 by this quiet, unassuming American. Such was the esteem and affection in which Beach was held, both during her life and after, that her many kindnesses and sheer hard work helping writers (and musicians) promote their work to a wider public, were rewarded by the fierce loyalty of not only her many friends but also an impressive literary elite of the time. Sylvia Beach Whitman still runs Shakespeare and Company, overlooking Notre Dame cathedral, six years after her father passed away. George Whitman, a friend of Sylvia Beach, who opened his own bookshop in 1951, La Mistral, in Rue de la Bucherie, renamed it Shakespeare and Company in her honor (1964). When Whitman’s only child was born in 1981, he named her Sylvia Beach Whitman. Hemingway wrote, “No-one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”
In Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, where many of his erstwhile Parisian compatriots were subjected to often exorable criticisms, Sylvia Beach remained unscathed.
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