The Lost Bookshop

Woods weaves historical references into the fictional events of her novel. For instance, Opaline lives in the 1920s and encounters several major historical figures of the time. She works at Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore in Paris owned by Sylvia Beach. Sylvia was an American-born expatriate, one of the major supporters of a group of artists and intellectuals in Paris called The Lost Generation. She published James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and supported Ernest Hemingway throughout his career. The Lost Generation (later the name of the generation after World War I) consisted largely of American and British expatriates in Paris, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who originated the Modernist literary movement.

Opaline’s experience in a psychiatric hospital is another important historical reference. The Connacht District Lunatic Asylum was a real hospital, now called St. Brigid’s Hospital, and was one of many such places throughout Ireland. Initially built to care for “curable lunatics,” they became places of ill treatment where those with genuine mental illnesses, criminals, and those committed without cause were mixed together in dangerous environments (“‘Tales From the Big House’ The Connacht District Lunatic Asylum in the Late Nineteenth Century.