Before Bernardine moved to Paris in the late spring of 1925, she had socialized regularly with the founders of The New Yorker. In Paris, she had big plans to use her love of the visual and performing arts to bring people together. In 1929, she left everything behind, setting out for Shanghai, where she would begin to write her own story.

Sonja Srinivasan’s vivid telling of a senator’s wife taking the train out of D.C, a city founded on freedom, raised on decorum, and bolstered by propriety, for New York.