While Anita Loos is best known for her comic novel "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes": The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925), her work includes many stage plays, screenplays, and memoirs of her years in the entertainment industry. Her fiction and plays, mostly in a comic vein, are notable for their heroines who, while subject to the restrictions placed on women at the time, enjoy a great deal of autonomy and power. Significantly, these heroines derive their power through their femininity rather than in spite of it. Loos's best heroines, typified by the irrepressible Lorelei Lee of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," are sexual creatures who deploy their femininity to achieve their own ends without paying a social price for their sexuality. Rather than attacking or debunking stereotypes of women, Loos created comic characters who gleefully set their worlds upside down and expose the limitations and hypocrisy of conventional morality.

Corinne Anita...