Who is Eileen Gray as noted in the book, After Sappho?

Eileen Gray is an Irish designer and architect who plays a prominent role in After Sappho. Eileen is born in 1878 in Ireland; to the despair of her governesses, she soon becomes “an unmarriageable artist” (116). She grows obsessed with colors and various lacquers, often creating screens for her friends. Along with Romaine Brooks and Ida Rubenstein, Eileen becomes an ambulance driver during the First World War. In 1922, she opens the Jean Désert Gallery in Paris. The gallery—which soon becomes popular with wealthy members of French society—features a transparent floor through which guests can observe Eileen’s furniture workshop. Several years later, Eileen designs a home in France that she called E.1027. The narrator describes the house, whose architecture engages deeply with ideas of interiorities and surfaces, as having “the hollows of a body built into it” (211).