Bonjour, Mademoiselle!
Bonjour, Mademoiselle!
Description
As Britain emerged from post-war austerity in the 1960s, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery.
Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she was told that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women - and denying Ashley her husband's inheritance.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley's extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.
'The book has a pleasant tone. Its authors, Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts, give a lesson in amiable tolerance and handle other thorny subjects without a touch of militancy. Their lesson seems to be that only fools rush in to judge what they cannot understand.'
-Richard Davenport-Hines, The Times
'April's extraordinarily courageous and pioneering personal journey is the story of a trans life well lived. At times heartbreaking, this book documents her setbacks - and also her ultimate triumph as a much loved trans hero!'
-Peter Tatchell, LGBT+ and human rights defender
'A dazzling account of a unique life woven into the wider story of dramatic social change across the best part of a century. It is also a story which resonates to the present day.'
-Paul Baker, author of Fabulosa! the story of Polari, Britain's secret gay language
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