'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast," Hemingway famously wrote. In "Dreaming in French," Alice Kaplan looks at three iconic American women -- Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis -- and captures not only the time each spent in France but also its reverberations throughout the rest of their lives.

The transatlantic transformation is familiar terrain for Kaplan, a Minneapolis native and Yale professor, who wrote about her own relationship with French language and culture in her splendid memoir, "French Lessons."

"Dreaming in French" blends the biographies of three very different women: "If you reduce them to identity labels, they are the soul of diversity: a Catholic debutante, a Jewish intellectual, an African-American revolutionary, from the East Coast, the West Coast, and the South," Kaplan writes. "They have often been reduced to their images: a sheath dress and a double strand of pearls, a mane of black hair with a white streak, an afro and a raised fist." In Kaplan's sedulously researched (and occasionally redundant) triptych, the three are united in their shared Francophilia, while Paris, a city experiencing its own transformation during France's "thirty glorious years," serves as a vivid backdrop.

Kaplan addresses the women chronologically, starting with Jacqueline Bouvier's austere, postwar Paris. A Vassar girl crowned "Queen Deb of the Year" by a society columnist, Bouvier joined Smith's rigorous study abroad program. Bouvier showed early signs of a compartmentalized life: attending classes in art history and literature by day while brushing elbows with fading French aristocracy and burgeoning American literati by night.

Sontag's Paris, roiled by the Algerian War, was populated with bohemians and expats. The willful, self-styled intellectual left her fellowship in Oxford in pursuit of her lover, writer Harriet Sohmers. Unaffiliated with any French universities, Sontag educated herself in Parisian cinemas and cafés: "After work, or trying to write or paint, you come to a café looking for people you know," she wrote. "One should go to several cafés -- average: four in the evening."

Of the three, the most hazily sketched portrait is of Angela Davis. Kaplan scours newspapers and interviews Davis' host family and fellow students in an attempt to access her inner life. (A Birmingham native, Davis read about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in the Herald Tribune in Biarritz.) Davis' connection to France -- and French thinkers -- comes across more clearly following her repatriation.

At times the book's conceit seems a bit thin -- there is little overlap among the three women (although Sontag once snubbed Jackie's cocktail party invitation). Nonetheless, "Dreaming in French" is an elegant and entertaining work.

Megan Doll is a writer in Minneapolis.