The Letters of Sylvia Beach edited by Keri Walsh

Sylvia Beach, sometimes called "the midwife of literary modernism", wrote the kind of letters that any of us might produce if we were running an under-capitalised cottage industry while simultaneously trying to be nice to James Joyce. In other words, the stream-of-paper communication which issued forth most days from the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris during the interwar years is chock-full of worries about recalcitrant radiators, searing headaches and whether or not it might be possible to smuggle banned copies of Ulysses into the US by way of the Canadian border. Beach's letters, a selection of which are published here for the first time, do not tell a tale of obvious heroism, even though the events which shadow them – insolvency, internment by the Nazis, dinner with Gertrude Stein – might tax most of us. Instead, their story is one of getting by – of just about managing to pay the bills and conserve health while doing your dogged best to ensure that western literature will never be the same again.

From her letters Beach does not sound like the sort of person who would go out of her way to peddle obscenity, which is technically what she did in 1922 when Shakespeare & Company brought out the first edition of Ulysses, a book that had been banned in all right-thinking territories. Clearly Beach understood exactly why the swollen river of Joyce's priapic prose mattered, but that doesn't mean that any of its chaotic lawlessness seeped into her own way of being. Rather her letters are full of the kind of polite chirpiness you might expect from a Presbyterian minister's daughter from Princeton. Even the most moderate slang – jazzed up, my stars, corking – is placed between metaphorical quotation marks. And the fact that Beach's life-long partner was a woman who kept a neighbouring avant-garde bookshop is hidden behind sedate references to "Miss Monnier", who occasionally sends her epistolary best wishes. When Adrienne Monnier killed herself in 1955, after years of torment from Ménière's disease, Beach allowed herself nothing more luxurious than a tight little "I'm glad it's over" in a note to one of her most intimate correspondents.

That Beach often felt a whole lot wilder underneath her chipper surface is suggested not just by her constant tension headaches but also by a remarkable unsent letter that she wrote to James Joyce in 1927 which is included in an appendix. It is the kind of letter we have all written, and then stuffed in a drawer for second thoughts. Addressing it to "Dear Mr Joyce", Beach explains tautly that "as my affection and admiration for you are unlimited, so is the work you pile on my shoulders", before proceeding to that lament which we would all love to scream to the world: "I am poor and tired too". Shortly after not receiving this letter, Joyce shifted the focus of his emotional and financial needs on to another well-bred woman, this time the British Harriet Weaver, whom he proceeded to suck dry in much the same way.

Reading Sylvia Beach's letters, as opposed to her biography, is a useful way of unpicking some of the sloppier myths that have grown up about her life and times in recent years. While it is easy to imagine keeping a bookshop/library where Hemingway, Gide and Maurois constantly pop in for a chat and a biscuit to be some kind of ideal, unalienated labour, Beach's letters show that it was far more tricky than that. For every witty exchange with a literary tyro there is an annoying "bunny" (the term Beach used to describe her abonnés or subscribers) who needs soothing and settling and making a fuss of. The upstairs neighbours constantly flood her premises, one of her sisters in the US is acting weird and, strange to say, some of her literary discoveries won't play nicely together. Far from being a midwife of anything, you get the feeling that Beach was often left playing the strict nanny whom everyone is secretly making a face at.

Although she managed to hide her books before the Nazis marched into Paris in 1940, Beach did not reopen Shakespeare & Company after the war (the shop which still carries the name today was set up with her blessing in 1951 by another expatriate American). Instead she found herself becoming a "keeper of the flame" for the new generation of academic experts on literary modernism, or "Joycean rag-pickers" as she christened them. Some, such as Richard Ellmann, she approved of and helped as best she could with manuscripts and recollections and introductions. Other polite young Americans turned out to be crew-cut snakes in the grass. Beach's particular loathing was reserved for Joseph Prescott, a pushy young rag-picker who played Beach off against Harriet Weaver in an attempt to scoop the world with his work on the great man's manuscripts before they could disappear into the giant maw of a university archive.

Only a fraction of Beach's letters are published here, which makes for a bitty reading experience as we jump from a girlish 1901 to a venerable 1962, the year in which she died. Friendships crumble and quarrels get repaired in what feels like an instant, although on closer inspection turns out to be a decade or two. Letters to Joyce are few and far between, and some fuller contextualising footnotes from the editor Keri Walsh would have been helpful. Your best bet, then, is first to read either Beach's own memoirs, published in 1959, or Noël Riley Fitch's still-valuable biography of 1983. Once you have the scope and scale of Beach's life and times lodged in your brain, use these letters to add texture and debunking detail.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.

This article was amended on 2 August 2010 to correct the spelling of "abonnés".

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