Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women, a biography in the tradition of Blanche Wiesen Cook's Eleanor Roosevelt, takes us from Edith Wharton's Gilded Age New York City to Ernest Hemingway's expatriate Paris and occupied France during World War II with four friends and lovers whose eclectic, extraordinary achievements have been overshadowed by recent attention to their male counterparts.Elizabeth Marbury, with clients like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, pioneered as a theatrical/literary agent. Her companion, Elsie de Wolfe, added interior design to the minuscule list of jobs at which a woman could make a living and still be a lady. Anne Vanderbilt, plagued by personal tragedy, worked for the poor, the sick, the addicted, and the imprisoned, and was celebrated for her World War I military hospital in France. The daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, Anne marched in the Triangle Shirtwaist Strike picket lines and built residences for working women. This delicious, gossipy group portrait is studded with anecdotes of their like-minded contemporaries--Edith Wharton, Ethel Barrymore, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many more--and with such legends as Henry Adams, Bernard Berenson, and Henry James. Never has the revolutionary era from the 1850s to the 1950s, that propelled America to world power, been seen through such an intimate, vivid, and realistic lens.