She is credited with inventing the modern bra, launched Salvador Dali on the international arts scene and founded a publishing house for writers including Hemingway, Joyce and Faulkner. But the extraordinary life of Caresse Crosby, a notorious figure in 1920s bohemian Paris, has been largely forgotten.

Now her remarkable story is being told, and in parts re-imagined, in a book written by her great-granddaughter, Tamara Colchester.

“Caresse was someone I wanted to try to get to know beyond the myth – she was my great-grandmother, she’s alive in me,” says Colchester, who lives in West Sussex.

The Heart is a Burial Ground, which has been eight years in the making, begins with a suicide. Caresse’s maverick husband Harry Crosby, a poet (and a banker) famously shot himself – and his mistress – at the Hotel des Artistes in New York. It was 1929 and he was 31.

The book describes how “tattooed suns on the soles of his long, gentle feet gave the police cause to raise their eyebrows, but it was his ochre-painted toenails that really got them talking”.

A wide-eyed, wild-spirited Bostonian (more Jim Morrison than Jay Gatsby) Crosby had chased and coveted Caresse, transforming her life, and much of Colchester’s book explores that emotional legacy. “There was always something incendiary about Harry. He had an otherworldly charisma, which had fascinated me growing up,” Colchester says.

The book was intended as a biography, but when Colchester’s laptop was stolen, a year’s work was lost and she was forced to start again. That setback gave her an opportunity, she says, to turn the book into something that “it seemed to want to become”.

“The voices were so alive, it really didn’t feel like me. It was like the characters were there, having it out with each other and I was just writing it down. It was quite a strange experience,” she recalls.

The final version of The Heart is a Burial Ground shifts back and forth in time, weaving fact with fiction. Colchester, used the writings and recordings of Caresse as a starting point, but wanted to dig deeper into “what was not said, what we don’t know, what’s been too painful to talk about. I wanted to look at what happens when you live your life like Caresse. What’s the fallout?”

Aged 21, Caresse kicked up a storm in high society Boston by ditching a rib-crushing corset for two handkerchiefs and a pink ribbon, sewn together. She secured a patent for the “backless brassiere” a year later and set up a business manufacturing them. (She later sold the design for $1,500 to Warner Brothers Corset Company, who are believed to have made millions from it.)

“Even then, there was something in her essence that knew she wanted to be free,” says Colchester. “The bra was perfectly symbolic. Her breaking away from the restricted life that she’d been born into.”

A one-time actress, Caresse met Harry in Boston while still married to her first husband, Richard Peabody, a first world war veteran with an obsession for fire engines.

“He had a fire bell and a pole installed in his house,” says Colchester.

The couple had two children together, but Caresse took them both to Paris to pursue a new life with Harry.

“Imagine what it must have been like for a child growing up underneath this insane show,” says Colchester.

Caresse and Harry’s Parisian exploits, usually involving parties, drugs and gambling were notorious. Black Sun Press, a small publishing house set up by the couple in 1927 (initially to print Harry’s own poems), was at the heart of a wild world of struggling expat writers and artists – the so-called lost generation.

Print runs were small, but Black Sun printed works by, Anaïs Nin, DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and many others.

The publishing house printed extracts of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Joyce even, so the story goes, had to add a few extra lines to pad out the last page and make it look more beautiful.

Yet Black Sun has been largely overlooked, forgotten even, by the modern literary world.

“It’s a strange thing. It seems to have been bypassed by the cultural mainstream,” says Colchester. “It’s strange because Harry and Caresse are so rich as characters.”

The Heart is a Burial Ground, by Tamara Colchester, is published by Simon & Schuster on 8 March at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846