Diana Holmes is Professor of French at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published widely on French women writers, including Colette, Rachilde, Renee Vivien, and bestselling romantic authors of the Belle Epoque. Her recent publications include Rachilde Decadence Gender and the Woman Writer (Berg, 2001), and she is working on a study of romance in 20th century France. Carrie Tarr is a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Kingston, UK. She has published extensively on gender and ethnicity in French cinema. Her recent publications include Cinema and the Second Sex: Women's Filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s (with B. Rollet, 2001) and Reframing Difference: beur and banlieue cinema in France (2005).

The Third Republic, known as the "belle epoque", was a period of lively, articulate and surprisingly radical feminist activity in France, borne out of the contradiction between the Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the reality of intense and systematic gender discrimination. Yet, it also was a period of intense and varied artistic production, with women disproving the critical nearconsensus that art was a masculine activity by writing, painting, performing, sculpting, and even displaying an interest in the new "seventh art" of cinema. This book explores all these facets of the period, weaving them into a complex, multi-stranded argument about the importance of this rich period of French women's history.