Natalie Clifford Barney
Encyclopedia
Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate
in Paris
.
Barney's salon
was held at her home on Paris' Left Bank
for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation
. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a "Women's Academy" in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont
to Truman Capote
.
She was openly lesbian
and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal as "the best way of getting rid of nuisances" (meaning heterosexual attention from young males). In her writings she supported feminism
and pacifism
. She opposed monogamy
and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships, including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien
and dancer Armen Ohanian
and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks
. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Sapphic Idyll to The Well of Loneliness
, arguably the most famous lesbian novel of the 20th century.
Natalie Barney was born in 1876 in Dayton, Ohio
, to Albert Clifford Barney and Alice Pike Barney
. Her father was the son of a wealthy manufacturer of railway cars and of English
descent, and her mother was of French
, Dutch
and German ancestry. When Natalie Barney was six years old her family spent the summer at New York
's Long Beach Hotel where Oscar Wilde
happened to be speaking on his American lecture tour. Wilde scooped her up as she ran past him fleeing a group of small boys, held her out of their reach then sat her down on his knee and told her a story. The next day he joined Barney and her mother on the beach, where their conversation changed the course of Alice's life, inspiring her to pursue art seriously, despite her husband's disapproval. She later studied under Carolus-Duran
and James McNeill Whistler
. Many of Alice Pike Barney's paintings are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum
.
Like many girls of her time, Natalie Barney had a haphazard education. Her interest in the French language
began with a governess
who read Jules Verne
stories aloud to her so she would have to learn quickly to understand them. Later she and her younger sister Laura Clifford Barney
attended Les Ruches, a French boarding school founded by feminist Marie Souvestre
and attended by such notables as Eleanor Roosevelt
. As an adult she spoke French fluently without an accent and made her home in Paris. Nearly all her published works were written in French.
When she was ten her family moved from Ohio to Washington, D.C.
, spending summers in Bar Harbor, Maine
. As the rebellious and unconventional daughter of one of the wealthiest families in town, she was often mentioned in Washington newspapers. In her early twenties she made headlines by galloping through Bar Harbor while driving a second horse on a lead ahead of her and by riding astride instead of sidesaddle
.
Barney later said she knew by age 12 she was lesbian and was determined to "live openly, without hiding anything." In 1899 after seeing the courtesan
Liane de Pougy
at a dance hall in Paris, Barney presented herself at de Pougy's residence in a page
costume and announced she was a "page of love" sent by Sappho
. Although de Pougy was one of the most famous women in France, constantly sought after by wealthy and titled men, Barney's audacity charmed her. Their brief affair became the subject of de Pougy's tell-all roman à clef
, Idylle Saphique (Sapphic Idyll). Published in 1901, this book became the talk of Paris, reprinted at least 69 times in its first year. Barney was soon well known as the model for one of the characters. By this time, however, the two had already broken up after quarreling repeatedly over Barney's desire to "rescue" de Pougy from her life as a courtesan.
Barney herself contributed a chapter to Idylle Saphique in which she described reclining at de Pougy's feet in a screened box at the theater, watching Sarah Bernhardt
's play Hamlet
. During intermission, Barney (as "Flossie") compares Hamlet's plight with that of women: "What is there for women who feel the passion for action when pitiless Destiny holds them in chains? Destiny made us women at a time when the law of men is the only law that is recognized." She also wrote Lettres à une Connue (Letters to a Woman I Have Known), her own epistolary novel
about the affair. Although Barney failed to find a publisher for the book and later called it naïve and clumsy, it is notable for its discussion of homosexuality
, which Barney regarded as natural and compared to albinism
. "My queerness," she said, "is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one."
. For Vivien it was love at first sight, while Barney became fascinated with Vivien after hearing her recite one of her poems, which she described as "haunted by the desire for death." Their romantic relationship was also a creative exchange that inspired both of them to write. Barney provided a feminist theoretical framework which Vivien explored in her poetry. They adapted the imagery of the Symbolist poets along with the conventions of courtly love
to describe love between women, also finding examples of heroic women in history and myth. Sappho
was an especially important influence and they studied Greek
so as to read the surviving fragments of her poetry in the original. Both wrote plays about her life.
Vivien saw Barney as a muse
and as Barney put it, "she had found new inspiration through me, almost without knowing me." Barney felt Vivien had cast her as a femme fatale
and that she wanted "to lose herself... entirely in suffering" for the sake of her art. Vivien also believed in fidelity
, which Barney was unwilling to agree to. While Barney was visiting her family in Washington, D.C. in 1901, Vivien stopped answering her letters. Barney tried to get her back for years, at one point persuading a friend, opera
tic mezzo-soprano
Emma Calvé
, to sing under Vivien's window so she could throw a poem (wrapped around a bouquet of flowers) up to Vivien on her balcony. Both flowers and poem were intercepted and returned by a governess.
In 1904 she wrote Je Me Souviens (I Remember), an intensely personal prose poem about their relationship which was presented as a single handwritten copy to Vivien in an attempt to win her back. They reconciled and traveled together to Lesbos
, where they lived happily together for a short time and talked about starting a school of poetry for women like the one which Sappho, according to tradition, had founded on Lesbos some 2,500 years before. However, Vivien soon got a letter from her lover Hélène (the Baroness de Zuylen de Nyevelt) and went to Constantinople
thinking she would break up with her in person. Vivien planned to meet Barney in Paris afterward but instead stayed with the Baroness and this time, the breakup was permanent.
Vivien's health declined rapidly after this. According to Vivien's friend and neighbor Colette
, she ate almost nothing and drank heavily, even rinsing her mouth with perfumed water to hide the smell. Colette's account has led some to call Vivien an anorexic
but this diagnosis did not yet exist at the time. Vivien was also addicted to the sedative chloral hydrate
. In 1908 she attempted suicide by overdosing on laudanum
and died the following year. In a memoir written fifty years later Barney said "She could not be saved. Her life was a long suicide. Everything turned to dust and ashes in her hands."
In 1900, Barney published her first book, a collection of poems called Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes
(Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women). The poems were written in traditional French verse and a formal, old-fashioned style since Barney did not care for free verse
. These poems have been described as "apprentice work" but by publishing them, Barney became the first woman poet to openly write about the love of women since Sappho. Her mother contributed pastel illustrations of the poems' subjects, wholly unaware three of the four women who modeled for her were her daughter's lovers.
Reviews were generally positive and glossed over the lesbian theme of the poems, some even misrepresenting it. The Washington Mirror said Barney "writes odes to men's lips and eyes; not like a novice, either." However, a headline in a society gossip paper cried out "Sappho Sings in Washington" and this alerted her father, who bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and printing plates.
To escape her father's sway Barney published her next book, Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (Five Short Greek Dialogues, 1901), under the pseudonym
Tryphé
. The name came from the works of Pierre Louÿs
, who helped to edit and revise the manuscript
. Barney also dedicated the book to him. The first of the dialogues is set in ancient Greece and contains a long description of Sappho, who is "more faithful in her inconstancy than others in their fidelity." Another argues for paganism
over Christianity
. Barney's father's death in 1902 left her with a substantial fortune, freeing her from any need to conceal the authorship of her books; she never used a pseudonym again.
Je Me Souviens was published in 1910, after Vivien's death. That same year, Barney published Actes et Entr'actes (Acts and Interludes), a collection of short plays and poems. One of the plays was Equivoque (Ambiguity), a revisionist
version on the legend of Sappho
's death: Instead of throwing herself off a cliff for the love of Phaon
the sailor, she does so out of grief that Phaon is marrying the woman she loves. The play incorporates quotations from Sappho's fragments, with Barney's own footnotes in Greek.
Barney did not take her poetry as seriously as Vivien did, saying, "if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem." Her plays were only performed through amateur productions in her garden. According to Karla Jay
, most of them lacked coherent plots and "would probably baffle even the most sympathetic audience." After 1910 she mostly wrote the epigram
s and memoirs for which she is better known. Her last book of poetry was called Poems & Poemes: Autres Alliances and came out in 1920, bringing together romantic poetry in both French and English. Barney asked Ezra Pound
to edit the poems but then ignored the detailed recommendations he made.
, a weekly gathering at which people met to socialize and discuss literature, art, music and any other topic of interest. Barney strove to feature women's writing while also hosting some of the most prominent male writers of her time. She brought together expatriate
Modernists with members of the French Academy. Joan Schenkar described Barney's salon as "a place where lesbian assignations and appointments with academics could coexist in a kind of cheerful, cross-pollinating, cognitive dissonance."
In the 1900s Barney held early gatherings of the salon at her house in Neuilly
. The entertainment included poetry readings and theatricals
(in which Colette
sometimes performed). Mata Hari
performed a dance once, riding into the garden as Lady Godiva
on a white horse harnessed with turquoise
cloisonné
.
The play Equivoque may have led Barney to leave Neuilly in 1909. According to a contemporary newspaper article, her landlord objected to her holding an outdoor performance of a play about Sappho, which he felt "followed nature too closely". She canceled her lease and rented the pavillon
at 20, Rue Jacob in Paris
' Latin Quarter
and her salon was held there until the late 1960s. This was a small two-story house, separated on three sides from the main building on the street. Next to the pavillon was a large, overgrown garden with a Doric
"Temple of Friendship" tucked into one corner. In this new location, the salon grew a more prim outward face, with poetry readings and conversation, perhaps because Barney had been told the pavillon's floors would not hold up to large dancing parties. Frequent guests during this period included Pierre Louÿs
, Paul Claudel
, Philippe Berthelot
and translator J. C. Mardrus
.
During World War I
the salon became a haven for those opposed to the war. Henri Barbusse
once gave a reading from his anti-war novel Under Fire and Barney hosted a Women's Congress for Peace at the Rue Jacob. Other visitors to the salon during the war included Oscar Milosz
, Auguste Rodin
and poet Alan Seeger
, who came while on leave from the French Foreign Legion
.
In the early 1920s, Ezra Pound was a close friend of Barney's and often visited. The two schemed together to subsidize Paul Valéry
and T. S. Eliot
so they could quit their jobs and focus on writing, but Valéry found other patrons and Eliot refused the grant
. Pound introduced Barney to avant-garde
composer George Antheil
and while her own taste in music leaned towards the traditional, she hosted premieres of Antheil's Symphony for Five Instruments and First String Quartet at the Rue Jacob. It was also at Barney's salon that Pound met his longtime mistress
, the violinist Olga Rudge
.
In 1927 Barney started an Académie des Femmes (Women's Academy) to honor women writers. This was a response to the influential French Academy which had been founded in the 17th century by Louis XIII and whose 40 "immortals" included no women at the time. Unlike the French Academy, her Women's Academy was not a formal organization, but rather a series of readings held as part of the regular Friday salons. Honorees included Colette
, Gertrude Stein
, Anna Wickham
, Rachilde
, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
, Mina Loy
, Djuna Barnes
and posthumously, Renée Vivien
.
Other visitors to the salon during the 20s included French writers André Gide
, Anatole France
, Max Jacob
, Louis Aragon
and Jean Cocteau
along with English-language writers Ford Madox Ford
, W. Somerset Maugham
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
, Sinclair Lewis
, Sherwood Anderson
, Thornton Wilder
, T. S. Eliot
and William Carlos Williams
and moreover, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore
(the first Nobel laureate from Asia), Romanian aesthetician
and diplomat
Matila Ghyka, journalist Janet Flanner
(who set the New Yorker
style), journalist, activist and publisher Nancy Cunard
, publishers Caresse
and Harry Crosby
, art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim
, Sylvia Beach
(the bookstore owner who published James Joyce
's Ulysses
), painters Tamara de Lempicka
and Marie Laurencin
and dancer Isadora Duncan
.
For her 1929 book Aventures de l'Esprit (Adventures of the Mind) Barney drew a social diagram which crowded the names of over a hundred people who had attended the salon into a rough map of the house, garden and Temple of Friendship. The first half of the book had reminiscences of 13 male writers she had known or met over the years and the second half had a chapter for each member of her Académie des Femmes. This gender-balanced structure was not carried through on the book's packaging, which listed eight of the male writers then added "... and some women."
In the late 20s Radclyffe Hall
drew a crowd after her novel The Well of Loneliness
had been banned in the UK. A reading by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
packed the salon in 1932. At another Friday salon in the 1930s Virgil Thomson
sang from Four Saints in Three Acts
, an opera based on a libretto by Gertrude Stein
.
Of the famous Modernist writers who spent time in Paris, Ernest Hemingway
never made an appearance at the salon. James Joyce
came once or twice but didn't care for it. Marcel Proust
never attended a Friday, though he did come to 20, Rue Jacob once to talk with Barney about lesbian culture whilst doing research for In Search of Lost Time
. His visit was delayed repeatedly owing to his poor health, and when the meeting finally did happen he was too nervous to bring up the subject he had come to talk about.
. Barney's pensées, like de Sablé's own Maximes, were short, often one-line epigrams or bon mots such as "There are more evil ears than bad mouths" and "To be married is to be neither alone nor together."
Her literary career got a boost after she sent a copy of Éparpillements to Remy de Gourmont
, a French poet, literary critic, and philosopher who had become a recluse after contracting the disfiguring disease lupus vulgaris
in his thirties. He was impressed enough to invite her to one of the Sunday gatherings at his home, at which he usually received only a small group of old friends. She was a rejuvenating influence in his life, coaxing him out for evening car rides, dinners at the Rue Jacob, a masked ball
, even a short cruise on the Seine
. He turned some of their wide-ranging conversations into a series of letters that he published in the Mercure de France
, addressing her as l'Amazone, a French word that can mean either horsewoman or Amazon
; the letters were later collected in book form. He died in 1915, but the nickname he gave her would stay with her all her life—even her tombstone identifies her as "the Amazon of Remy de Gourmont"—and his Letters to the Amazon left readers wanting to know more about the woman who had inspired them.
Barney obliged in 1920 with Pensées d'une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon), her most overtly political work. In the first section, "Sexual Adversity, War, and Feminism", she developed feminist
and pacifist
themes, describing war as an "involuntary and collective suicide ordained by man". In war, she said, men "father death as women mother life, with courage and without choice". The epigrammatic form makes it difficult to determine the details of Barney's views; ideas are presented only to be dropped, and some pensées seem to contradict others. Some critics interpret her as saying that the aggression that leads to war is visible in all male relationships. Karla Jay, however, argues that her philosophy was not that sweeping, and is better summed up by the epigram "Those who love war lack the love of an adequate sport—the art of living."
Another section of Pensées d'une Amazone, "Misunderstanding, or Sappho's Lawsuit", gathered historical writings about homosexuality along with her own commentary. She also covered topics such as alcohol, friendship, old age, and literature, writing "Novels are longer than life" and "Romanticism is a childhood ailment; those who had it young are the most robust." A third volume, Nouvelles Pensées de l'Amazone (New Thoughts of the Amazon), appeared in 1939.
The One Who is Legion, or A.D.'s After-Life (1930) was Barney's only book written entirely in English, as well as her only novel. Illustrated by Romaine Brooks
, it concerns a suicide
, known only as A.D., who is brought back to life as a hermaphroditic
being and reads the book of her own life. This book-within-a-book
, entitled The Love-Lives of A.D., is a collection of hymns, poems and epigrams, much like Barney's own other writings.
. As early as 1901, in Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs, she argued in favor of multiple relationships and against jealousy; in Éparpillements she wrote "One is unfaithful to those one loves in order that their charm does not become mere habit." While she could be jealous herself, she actively encouraged at least some of her lovers to be non-monogamous as well.
Due in part to Jean Chalon's early biography of her, published in English as Portrait of a Seductress, she had become more widely known for her many relationships than for her writing or her salon. She once wrote out a list, divided into three categories: liaisons, demi-liaisons, and adventures. Colette
was a demi-liaison, while the artist and furniture designer Eyre de Lanux
, with whom she had an off-and-on affair for several years, was listed as an adventure. Among the liaisons—the relationships that she considered most important—were Olive Custance
, Renée Vivien
, Elisabeth de Gramont
, Romaine Brooks
, and Dolly Wilde
. Of these, the three longest relationships were with de Gramont, Brooks, and Wilde; from 1927, she was involved with all three of them simultaneously, a situation that ended only with Wilde's death. Her shorter affairs, such as those with Colette and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
, often evolved into lifelong friendships.
Elisabeth de Gramont, the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre, was a writer best known for her popular memoirs. A descendant of Henry IV of France
, she had grown up among the aristocracy; when she was a child, according to Janet Flanner, "peasants on her farm... begged her not to clean her shoes before entering their houses". She looked back on this lost world of wealth and privilege with little regret, and became known as the "red duchess" for her support of socialism
. She was married and had two daughters in 1910, when she met Natalie Barney; her husband is said to have been violent and tyrannical. They eventually separated, and in 1918 she and Barney wrote up a marriage contract stating that "[n]o one union shall be so strong as this union, nor another joining so tender—nor relationship so lasting."
De Gramont accepted Barney's nonmonogamy—perhaps reluctantly at first—and went out of her way to be gracious to her other lovers, always including Romaine Brooks when she invited Barney to vacation in the country. The relationship continued until de Gramont's death in 1954.
Barney's longest relationship was with the American painter
Romaine Brooks
, whom she met around 1914. Brooks specialized in portrait
ure and was noted for her somber palette of gray, black, and white. During the 1920s she painted portraits of several members of Barney's social circle, including de Gramont and Barney herself.
Brooks tolerated Barney's casual affairs well enough to tease her about them, and had a few of her own over the years, but could become jealous when a new love became serious. Usually she simply left town, but at one point she gave Barney an ultimatum to choose between her and Dolly Wilde—relenting once Barney had given in. At the same time, while Brooks was devoted to Barney, she did not want to live with her as a full-time couple; she disliked Paris, disdained Barney's friends, hated the constant socializing on which Barney thrived, and felt that she was fully herself only when alone. To accommodate Brooks's need for solitude they built a summer home consisting of two separate wings joined by a dining room, which they called Villa Trait d'Union, the hyphenated villa. Brooks also spent much of the year in Italy or travelling elsewhere in Europe, away from Barney. They remained devoted to one another for over fifty years.
was the niece of Oscar Wilde
and the last of her family to bear the Wilde name. She was renowned for her epigrammatic wit but, unlike her famous uncle, never managed to apply her gifts to any publishable writing; her letters are her only legacy. She did some work as a translator and was often supported by others, including Natalie Barney, whom she met in 1927.
Like Vivien, Wilde seemed bent on self-destruction. She drank heavily, was addicted to heroin, and attempted suicide several times. Barney financed detoxifications, which were never effective; she emerged from one nursing-home stay with a new dependency on the sleeping draught paraldehyde
, then available over-the-counter.
In 1939 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused surgery, seeking alternative treatments. The following year, World War II
separated her from Barney; she fled Paris
for England while Barney went to Italy with Brooks. She died in 1941 from causes that have never been fully explained, possibly a paraldehyde overdose.
have been controversial. In 1937, Una, Lady Troubridge
had complained that Barney "talked a lot of half-baked nonsense about the tyranny of fascism
". Barney herself was one-eighth Jewish, and since she spent the war in Italy with Romaine Brooks, risked deportation to a concentration camp—a fate she avoided only by wiring
her sister Laura for a notarized
document attesting to her confirmation. Nevertheless, having no other source of information about the war, she believed Axis
propaganda
that portrayed the Allies
as the aggressors, so that pro-Fascism
seemed to her to be a logical consequence of her pacifism
. An unpublished memoir she wrote during the war years is pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic, quoting speeches by Hitler, apparently with approval.
It is possible that the anti-Semitic passages in her memoir were intended to be used as evidence that she was not Jewish; alternatively, she may have been influenced by Ezra Pound
's anti-Semitic radio broadcasts. Whatever the case, she did help a Jewish couple escape Italy, providing passage on a ship to the United States. By the end of the war her sympathies had again changed, and she saw the Allies as liberators.
Villa Trait d'Union was destroyed by bombing. After the war, Brooks declined to live with Barney in Paris; she remained in Italy, and they visited each other frequently. Their relationship remained monogamous until the mid-1950s, when Barney met her last new love, Janine Lahovary, the wife of a retired Romania
n ambassador. Lahovary made a point of winning Romaine Brooks's friendship, Barney reassured Brooks that their relationship still came first, and the triangle appeared to be stable.
The salon resumed in 1949 and continued to attract young writers for whom it was as much a piece of history as a place where literary reputations were made. Truman Capote
was an intermittent guest for almost ten years; he described the decor as "totally turn-of-the-century" and remembered that Barney introduced him to the models for several characters in Marcel Proust
's In Search of Lost Time
. Alice B. Toklas
became a regular after Gertrude Stein's death in 1946. Fridays in the 1960s honored Mary McCarthy
and Marguerite Yourcenar
, who in 1980—eight years after Barney's death—became the first female member of the French Academy.
Barney did not return to writing epigrams, but did publish two volumes of memoirs about other writers she had known, Souvenirs Indiscrets (Indiscreet Memories, 1960) and Traits et Portraits (Traits and Portraits, 1963). She also worked to find a publisher for Brooks's memoirs and to place her paintings in galleries.
In the late 1960s Brooks became increasingly reclusive and paranoid; she sank into a depression and refused to see the doctors Barney sent. Bitter at Lahovary's presence during their last years, which she had hoped they would spend exclusively together, she finally broke off contact with Barney. Barney continued to write to her, but received no replies. Brooks died in December 1970, and Barney on February 2, 1972 of heart failure.
's feminist work of art The Dinner Party
. In the 1980s Barney began to be recognized for what Karla Jay calls an "almost uncanny anticipation" of the concerns of later feminist writers. English translations of some of her memoirs, essays, and epigrams appeared in 1992, but most of her plays and poetry are still untranslated.
Her indirect influence on literature, through her salon and her many literary friendships, can be seen in the number of writers who have addressed or portrayed her in their works. Claudine S'en Va (Claudine and Annie, 1903) by Colette
contains a brief appearance by Barney as "Miss Flossie," echoing the nickname she had earlier been given in de Pougy's novel Idylle Saphique. Renée Vivien
wrote many poems about her, as well as a Symbolist
novel, Une Femme M'Apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904), in which she is described as having "eyes ... as sharp and blue as a blade.... The charm of peril emanated from her and drew me inexorably." Remy de Gourmont
addressed her in his Letters to the Amazon, and Truman Capote
mentioned her in his last, unfinished novel Answered Prayers
. She also appeared in two later novels by writers who never met her: Francesco Rapazzini's Un Soir chez l'Amazone (An Evening with the Amazon, 2004) is a historical novel about Barney's salon, while Anna Livia's Minimax (1991) portrays both her and Renee Vivien as still-living vampires.
According to Lillian Faderman, "There was probably no lesbian in the four decades between 1928 and the late 1960s capable of reading English or any of the eleven languages into which the book was translated who was unfamiliar with The Well of Loneliness
." Although the novel's author, Radclyffe Hall, intended it as an argument for greater tolerance for what she called "sexual inverts
", it has often been criticized by lesbian readers for its protagonist's self-hatred and its use of terms like "freak" and "mistake of nature". Barney, as the salon hostess Valérie Seymour, appears in the novel as the symbol of a different attitude. "Valérie, placid and self-assured, created an atmosphere of courage; everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour's."
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
wrote love poems to Barney in the early years of the century, and in 1930 depicted her in a novel, L'Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts), in which she said she "analyzed and described Natalie at length as well as the life into which she initiated me". The protagonist
of the novel is a hermaphrodite
named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées
. Barney is Laurette Wells, a salon hostess who spends much of the novel trying to win back an ex-lover loosely based on Renée Vivien. The book's portrayal of her is, at times, harshly critical, but she is the only person whose company Marion enjoys. He/she tells Wells that she is "perverse... dissolute, self-centered, unfair, stubborn, sometimes miserly... [but] a genuine rebel, ever ready to incite others to rebellion.... [Y]ou are capable of loving someone just as they are, even a thief—in that lies your only fidelity. And so you have my respect."
After meeting Barney in the 1930s, the Russian poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva addressed her in a Letter to the Amazon (1934) in which she expressed her conflicted feelings about love between women. The result, according to Terry Castle
, is "an entirely cryptic, paranoid, overwhelming piece of reverie".
Barney and the women in her social circle are the subject of Djuna Barnes
's Ladies Almanack
(1928), a roman à clef
written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style, with Barnes' own illustrations in the style of Elizabethan woodcut
s. She has the lead role as Dame Evangeline Musset, "who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most, lament Cruelly". "[A] Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty"; she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood. Also appearing pseudonymously are Elisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks
, Dolly Wilde
, Radclyffe Hall
and her partner Una, Lady Troubridge, Janet Flanner
and Solita Solano, and Mina Loy
. The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barney herself loved the book and reread it throughout her life.
On October 26, 2009, Barney was honored with a historical marker
in her home town of Dayton, Ohio
. The marker is the first in Ohio to note the sexual orientation of its honoree. This plaque was vandalized in July 2010.
Expatriate
An expatriate is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
.
Barney's salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
was held at her home on Paris' Left Bank
Rive Gauche
La Rive Gauche is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. Here the river flows roughly westward, cutting the city in two: looking downstream, the southern bank is to the left, and the northern bank is to the right....
for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...
. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a "Women's Academy" in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...
to Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
.
She was openly lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal as "the best way of getting rid of nuisances" (meaning heterosexual attention from young males). In her writings she supported feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and pacifism
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
. She opposed monogamy
Monogamy
Monogamy /Gr. μονός+γάμος - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time. In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction...
and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships, including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn was a British poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school...
and dancer Armen Ohanian
Armen Ohanian
Armen Ohanian , born Sophia Pirboudaghian was an Armenian dancer, actress, writer, and translator.-Biography:Armen Ohanian was born in Shamakha, then part of the Russian Empire to an upper-class Armenian family. A devastating earthquake caused her family to move to Baku, where she attended a...
and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard , was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray...
. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Sapphic Idyll to The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" is apparent from an early age...
, arguably the most famous lesbian novel of the 20th century.
Early life
Dayton, Ohio
Dayton is the 6th largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Montgomery County, the fifth most populous county in the state. The population was 141,527 at the 2010 census. The Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 841,502 in the 2010 census...
, to Albert Clifford Barney and Alice Pike Barney
Alice Pike Barney
Alice Pike Barney was an American painter. She was active in Washington, D.C. and worked to make Washington into a center of the arts....
. Her father was the son of a wealthy manufacturer of railway cars and of English
English people
The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...
descent, and her mother was of French
French people
The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...
, Dutch
Dutch people
The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...
and German ancestry. When Natalie Barney was six years old her family spent the summer at New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
's Long Beach Hotel where Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
happened to be speaking on his American lecture tour. Wilde scooped her up as she ran past him fleeing a group of small boys, held her out of their reach then sat her down on his knee and told her a story. The next day he joined Barney and her mother on the beach, where their conversation changed the course of Alice's life, inspiring her to pursue art seriously, despite her husband's disapproval. She later studied under Carolus-Duran
Carolus-Duran
Charles Auguste Émile Durand, known as Carolus-Duran , was a French painter and art instructor. He is noted for his stylish depictions of members of high society in Third Republic France.-Biography:...
and James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
. Many of Alice Pike Barney's paintings are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum is a museum in Washington, D.C. with an extensive collection of American art.Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the museum has a broad variety of American art that covers all regions and art movements found in the United States...
.
Like many girls of her time, Natalie Barney had a haphazard education. Her interest in the French language
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
began with a governess
Governess
A governess is a girl or woman employed to teach and train children in a private household. In contrast to a nanny or a babysitter, she concentrates on teaching children, not on meeting their physical needs...
who read Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
stories aloud to her so she would have to learn quickly to understand them. Later she and her younger sister Laura Clifford Barney
Laura Clifford Barney
Laura Clifford Barney , married name Laura Dreyfus-Barney became a leading American Bahá'í teacher and philanthropist. The daughter of Albert and Alice Pike Barney. Albert Clifford Barney was the son of a manufacturer of railway cars and was of English descent...
attended Les Ruches, a French boarding school founded by feminist Marie Souvestre
Marie Souvestre
Marie Souvestre was a feminist educator who sought to develop independent minds in young women.-Biography:Souvestre was born on April 28, 1830, in Brest, France, the daughter of French novelist Émile Souvestre....
and attended by such notables as Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
. As an adult she spoke French fluently without an accent and made her home in Paris. Nearly all her published works were written in French.
When she was ten her family moved from Ohio to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, spending summers in Bar Harbor, Maine
Bar Harbor, Maine
Bar Harbor is a town on Mount Desert Island in Hancock County, Maine, United States. As of the 2010 census, its population is 5,235. Bar Harbor is a famous summer colony in the Down East region of Maine. It is home to the College of the Atlantic, Jackson Laboratory and Mount Desert Island...
. As the rebellious and unconventional daughter of one of the wealthiest families in town, she was often mentioned in Washington newspapers. In her early twenties she made headlines by galloping through Bar Harbor while driving a second horse on a lead ahead of her and by riding astride instead of sidesaddle
Sidesaddle
Sidesaddle riding is a form of Equestrianism that uses a type of saddle which allows a rider to sit aside rather than astride a horse, mule or pony. Sitting aside dates back to antiquity and developed in European countries in the Middle Ages as a way for women in skirts to ride a horse in a modest...
.
Courtesan
A courtesan was originally a female courtier, which means a person who attends the court of a monarch or other powerful person.In feudal society, the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and social and political life were often completely mixed together...
Liane de Pougy
Liane de Pougy
Liane de Pougy , was a Folies Bergères dancer renowned as one of Paris's most beautiful and notorious courtesans.- Early Life and Marriage :...
at a dance hall in Paris, Barney presented herself at de Pougy's residence in a page
Page (servant)
A page or page boy is a traditionally young male servant, a messenger at the service of a nobleman or royal.-The medieval page:In medieval times, a page was an attendant to a knight; an apprentice squire...
costume and announced she was a "page of love" sent by Sappho
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
. Although de Pougy was one of the most famous women in France, constantly sought after by wealthy and titled men, Barney's audacity charmed her. Their brief affair became the subject of de Pougy's tell-all roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
, Idylle Saphique (Sapphic Idyll). Published in 1901, this book became the talk of Paris, reprinted at least 69 times in its first year. Barney was soon well known as the model for one of the characters. By this time, however, the two had already broken up after quarreling repeatedly over Barney's desire to "rescue" de Pougy from her life as a courtesan.
Barney herself contributed a chapter to Idylle Saphique in which she described reclining at de Pougy's feet in a screened box at the theater, watching Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt was a French stage and early film actress, and has been referred to as "the most famous actress the world has ever known". Bernhardt made her fame on the stages of France in the 1870s, and was soon in demand in Europe and the Americas...
's play Hamlet
Prince Hamlet
Prince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and...
. During intermission, Barney (as "Flossie") compares Hamlet's plight with that of women: "What is there for women who feel the passion for action when pitiless Destiny holds them in chains? Destiny made us women at a time when the law of men is the only law that is recognized." She also wrote Lettres à une Connue (Letters to a Woman I Have Known), her own epistolary novel
Epistolary novel
An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
about the affair. Although Barney failed to find a publisher for the book and later called it naïve and clumsy, it is notable for its discussion of homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
, which Barney regarded as natural and compared to albinism
Albinism
Albinism is a congenital disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes due to absence or defect of an enzyme involved in the production of melanin...
. "My queerness," she said, "is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one."
Renée Vivien
In November 1899 Barney met the poet Pauline Tarn, better known by her pen name Renée VivienRenée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn was a British poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school...
. For Vivien it was love at first sight, while Barney became fascinated with Vivien after hearing her recite one of her poems, which she described as "haunted by the desire for death." Their romantic relationship was also a creative exchange that inspired both of them to write. Barney provided a feminist theoretical framework which Vivien explored in her poetry. They adapted the imagery of the Symbolist poets along with the conventions of courtly love
Courtly love
Courtly love was a medieval European conception of nobly and chivalrously expressing love and admiration. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife....
to describe love between women, also finding examples of heroic women in history and myth. Sappho
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
was an especially important influence and they studied Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
so as to read the surviving fragments of her poetry in the original. Both wrote plays about her life.
Muse
The Muses in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature, are the goddesses who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge, related orally for centuries in the ancient culture, that was contained in poetic lyrics and myths...
and as Barney put it, "she had found new inspiration through me, almost without knowing me." Barney felt Vivien had cast her as a femme fatale
Femme fatale
A femme fatale is a mysterious and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetype of literature and art...
and that she wanted "to lose herself... entirely in suffering" for the sake of her art. Vivien also believed in fidelity
Fidelity
"Fidelity" is the quality of being faithful or loyal. Its original meaning regarded duty to a lord or a king, in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty. Both derive from the Latin word fidēlis, meaning "faithful or loyal"....
, which Barney was unwilling to agree to. While Barney was visiting her family in Washington, D.C. in 1901, Vivien stopped answering her letters. Barney tried to get her back for years, at one point persuading a friend, opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
tic mezzo-soprano
Mezzo-soprano
A mezzo-soprano is a type of classical female singing voice whose range lies between the soprano and the contralto singing voices, usually extending from the A below middle C to the A two octaves above...
Emma Calvé
Emma Calvé
Emma Calvé, born Rosa Emma Calvet , was a French operatic soprano.Calvé was probably the most famous French female opera singer of the Belle Époque. Hers was an international career, and she sang regularly and to considerable acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, and the Royal Opera...
, to sing under Vivien's window so she could throw a poem (wrapped around a bouquet of flowers) up to Vivien on her balcony. Both flowers and poem were intercepted and returned by a governess.
In 1904 she wrote Je Me Souviens (I Remember), an intensely personal prose poem about their relationship which was presented as a single handwritten copy to Vivien in an attempt to win her back. They reconciled and traveled together to Lesbos
Lesbos Island
Lesbos is a Greek island located in the northeastern Aegean Sea. It has an area of with 320 kilometres of coastline, making it the third largest Greek island. It is separated from Turkey by the narrow Mytilini Strait....
, where they lived happily together for a short time and talked about starting a school of poetry for women like the one which Sappho, according to tradition, had founded on Lesbos some 2,500 years before. However, Vivien soon got a letter from her lover Hélène (the Baroness de Zuylen de Nyevelt) and went to Constantinople
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
thinking she would break up with her in person. Vivien planned to meet Barney in Paris afterward but instead stayed with the Baroness and this time, the breakup was permanent.
Vivien's health declined rapidly after this. According to Vivien's friend and neighbor Colette
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
, she ate almost nothing and drank heavily, even rinsing her mouth with perfumed water to hide the smell. Colette's account has led some to call Vivien an anorexic
Anorexia nervosa
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by refusal to maintain a healthy body weight and an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Although commonly called "anorexia", that term on its own denotes any symptomatic loss of appetite and is not strictly accurate...
but this diagnosis did not yet exist at the time. Vivien was also addicted to the sedative chloral hydrate
Chloral hydrate
Chloral hydrate is a sedative and hypnotic drug as well as a chemical reagent and precursor. The name chloral hydrate indicates that it is formed from chloral by the addition of one molecule of water. Its chemical formula is C2H3Cl3O2....
. In 1908 she attempted suicide by overdosing on laudanum
Laudanum
Laudanum , also known as Tincture of Opium, is an alcoholic herbal preparation containing approximately 10% powdered opium by weight ....
and died the following year. In a memoir written fifty years later Barney said "She could not be saved. Her life was a long suicide. Everything turned to dust and ashes in her hands."
Poetry and plays
Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes
Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes is a poetry chapbook, by Natalie Clifford Barney, with watercolor illustrations by Alice Pike Barney.It was published in an edition of 500, by Librarie Paul Ollendorf....
(Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women). The poems were written in traditional French verse and a formal, old-fashioned style since Barney did not care for free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
. These poems have been described as "apprentice work" but by publishing them, Barney became the first woman poet to openly write about the love of women since Sappho. Her mother contributed pastel illustrations of the poems' subjects, wholly unaware three of the four women who modeled for her were her daughter's lovers.
Reviews were generally positive and glossed over the lesbian theme of the poems, some even misrepresenting it. The Washington Mirror said Barney "writes odes to men's lips and eyes; not like a novice, either." However, a headline in a society gossip paper cried out "Sappho Sings in Washington" and this alerted her father, who bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and printing plates.
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Tryphé
Tryphé
Tryphé -- variously glossed as "softness","voluptuousness","magnificence"and "extravagance", none fully adequate—is a concept that drew attention in Roman antiquity when it became a significant factor in the reign of the Ptolemaic dynasty.Classical authors such as Aeschines and Plutarch condemned...
. The name came from the works of Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who "expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection."-Life:...
, who helped to edit and revise the manuscript
Manuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
. Barney also dedicated the book to him. The first of the dialogues is set in ancient Greece and contains a long description of Sappho, who is "more faithful in her inconstancy than others in their fidelity." Another argues for paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
over Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
. Barney's father's death in 1902 left her with a substantial fortune, freeing her from any need to conceal the authorship of her books; she never used a pseudonym again.
Je Me Souviens was published in 1910, after Vivien's death. That same year, Barney published Actes et Entr'actes (Acts and Interludes), a collection of short plays and poems. One of the plays was Equivoque (Ambiguity), a revisionist
Historical revisionism
In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event...
version on the legend of Sappho
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
's death: Instead of throwing herself off a cliff for the love of Phaon
Phaon
Phaon in Greek mythology was a boatman of Mitylene in Lesbos. He was old and ugly when Aphrodite came to his boat. She put on the guise of a crone. Phaon ferried her over to Asia Minor and accepted no payment for doing so. In return, she gave him a box of ointment. When he rubbed it on himself, he...
the sailor, she does so out of grief that Phaon is marrying the woman she loves. The play incorporates quotations from Sappho's fragments, with Barney's own footnotes in Greek.
Barney did not take her poetry as seriously as Vivien did, saying, "if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem." Her plays were only performed through amateur productions in her garden. According to Karla Jay
Karla Jay
Karla Jay is a professor of English and the director of the Women's and Gender Studies program at Pace University. A pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies, she is widely published....
, most of them lacked coherent plots and "would probably baffle even the most sympathetic audience." After 1910 she mostly wrote the epigram
Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....
s and memoirs for which she is better known. Her last book of poetry was called Poems & Poemes: Autres Alliances and came out in 1920, bringing together romantic poetry in both French and English. Barney asked Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
to edit the poems but then ignored the detailed recommendations he made.
Salon
For over 60 years, Barney hosted a literary salonSalon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
, a weekly gathering at which people met to socialize and discuss literature, art, music and any other topic of interest. Barney strove to feature women's writing while also hosting some of the most prominent male writers of her time. She brought together expatriate
Expatriate
An expatriate is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing...
Modernists with members of the French Academy. Joan Schenkar described Barney's salon as "a place where lesbian assignations and appointments with academics could coexist in a kind of cheerful, cross-pollinating, cognitive dissonance."
In the 1900s Barney held early gatherings of the salon at her house in Neuilly
Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neuilly-sur-Seine is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.Although Neuilly is technically a suburb of Paris, it is immediately adjacent to the city and directly extends it. The area is composed of mostly wealthy, select residential...
. The entertainment included poetry readings and theatricals
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
(in which Colette
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
sometimes performed). Mata Hari
Mata Hari
Mata Hari was the stage name of Margaretha Geertruida "M'greet" Zelle , a Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan, and accused spy who was executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I.-Early life:Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in Leeuwarden, Friesland,...
performed a dance once, riding into the garden as Lady Godiva
Lady Godiva
Godiva , often referred to as Lady Godiva , was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants...
on a white horse harnessed with turquoise
Turquoise
Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral that is a hydrous phosphate of copper and aluminium, with the chemical formula CuAl648·4. It is rare and valuable in finer grades and has been prized as a gem and ornamental stone for thousands of years owing to its unique hue...
cloisonné
Cloisonné
Cloisonné is an ancient technique for decorating metalwork objects, in recent centuries using vitreous enamel, and in older periods also inlays of cut gemstones, glass, and other materials. The resulting objects can also be called cloisonné...
.
Pavilion (structure)
In architecture a pavilion has two main meanings.-Free-standing structure:Pavilion may refer to a free-standing structure sited a short distance from a main residence, whose architecture makes it an object of pleasure. Large or small, there is usually a connection with relaxation and pleasure in...
at 20, Rue Jacob in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
' Latin Quarter
Latin Quarter
Latin Quarter is a part of the 5th arrondissement in Paris.Latin Quarter may also refer to:* Latin Quarter , a British pop/rock band* Latin Quarter , a 1945 British film*Latin Quarter, Aarhus, part of Midtbyen, Aarhus C, Denmark...
and her salon was held there until the late 1960s. This was a small two-story house, separated on three sides from the main building on the street. Next to the pavillon was a large, overgrown garden with a Doric
Doric order
The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of ancient Greek or classical architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian.-History:...
"Temple of Friendship" tucked into one corner. In this new location, the salon grew a more prim outward face, with poetry readings and conversation, perhaps because Barney had been told the pavillon's floors would not hold up to large dancing parties. Frequent guests during this period included Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who "expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection."-Life:...
, Paul Claudel
Paul Claudel
Paul Claudel was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for his verse dramas, which often convey his devout Catholicism.-Life:...
, Philippe Berthelot
Philippe Berthelot
Philippe Berthelot was an important French diplomat, son of Marcellin Berthelot. He was a republican ....
and translator J. C. Mardrus
J. C. Mardrus
Joseph Charles Mardrus, otherwise known as "Jean-Charles Mardrus" , born in Cairo, was a French physician and a noted translator. Jean-Charles's surname was originally Mardirossian, but the family shortened it to Mardrus. His family had some Armenian origins, and his relatives were so wealthy that...
.
During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
the salon became a haven for those opposed to the war. Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse
Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party.-Life:...
once gave a reading from his anti-war novel Under Fire and Barney hosted a Women's Congress for Peace at the Rue Jacob. Other visitors to the salon during the war included Oscar Milosz
Oscar Milosz
Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a French-Lithuanian writer and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary work was concerned with symbols and associations. A recluse, his poems were vibrant and tormented, concerned with love, loneliness and anger. Milosz was primarily...
, Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...
and poet Alan Seeger
Alan Seeger
Alan Seeger was an American poet who fought and died in World War I serving in the French Foreign Legion. A statue to his memory and to...
, who came while on leave from the French Foreign Legion
French Foreign Legion
The French Foreign Legion is a unique military service wing of the French Army established in 1831. The foreign legion was exclusively created for foreign nationals willing to serve in the French Armed Forces...
.
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
and T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
so they could quit their jobs and focus on writing, but Valéry found other patrons and Eliot refused the grant
Grant (money)
Grants are funds disbursed by one party , often a Government Department, Corporation, Foundation or Trust, to a recipient, often a nonprofit entity, educational institution, business or an individual. In order to receive a grant, some form of "Grant Writing" often referred to as either a proposal...
. Pound introduced Barney to avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
composer George Antheil
George Antheil
George Antheil was an American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor. A self-described "Bad Boy of Music", his modernist compositions amazed and appalled listeners in Europe and the US during the 1920s with their cacophonous celebration of mechanical devices.Returning permanently to...
and while her own taste in music leaned towards the traditional, she hosted premieres of Antheil's Symphony for Five Instruments and First String Quartet at the Rue Jacob. It was also at Barney's salon that Pound met his longtime mistress
Mistress (lover)
A mistress is a long-term female lover and companion who is not married to her partner; the term is used especially when her partner is married. The relationship generally is stable and at least semi-permanent; however, the couple does not live together openly. Also the relationship is usually,...
, the violinist Olga Rudge
Olga Rudge
Olga Rudge was an American-born concert violinist, now mainly remembered as the long-time mistress of the poet Ezra Pound, by whom she had a daughter, Mary....
.
In 1927 Barney started an Académie des Femmes (Women's Academy) to honor women writers. This was a response to the influential French Academy which had been founded in the 17th century by Louis XIII and whose 40 "immortals" included no women at the time. Unlike the French Academy, her Women's Academy was not a formal organization, but rather a series of readings held as part of the regular Friday salons. Honorees included Colette
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
, Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, Anna Wickham
Anna Wickham
Anna Wickham was the pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Harper , a British poet with strong Australian connections. She is remembered as a modernist figure and feminist writer, though one not able to command sustained critical attention in her lifetime...
, Rachilde
Rachilde
Rachilde was the nom de plume of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, a French author who was born February 11, 1860 in Périgueux, Périgord, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France during the Second French Empire and died on April 4, 1953....
, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was a French journalist, poet, novelist, sculptor, historian and designer...
, Mina Loy
Mina Loy
Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S...
, Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
and posthumously, Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn was a British poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school...
.
Other visitors to the salon during the 20s included French writers André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
, Anatole France
Anatole France
Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, , was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters...
, Max Jacob
Max Jacob
Max Jacob was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.-Life and career:After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, France, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career...
, Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon
Louis Aragon , was a French poet, novelist and editor, a long-time member of the Communist Party and a member of the Académie Goncourt.- Early life :...
and Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
along with English-language writers Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...
, W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham , CH was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and, reputedly, the highest paid author during the 1930s.-Childhood and education:...
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...
, Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
, Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,...
, T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
and moreover, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...
(the first Nobel laureate from Asia), Romanian aesthetician
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and diplomat
Diplomat
A diplomat is a person appointed by a state to conduct diplomacy with another state or international organization. The main functions of diplomats revolve around the representation and protection of the interests and nationals of the sending state, as well as the promotion of information and...
Matila Ghyka, journalist Janet Flanner
Janet Flanner
Janet Flanner was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975. She wrote under the pen name "Genêt"...
(who set the New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
style), journalist, activist and publisher Nancy Cunard
Nancy Cunard
Nancy Clara Cunard was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class but strongly rejected her family's values, devoting much of her life to fighting racism and fascism...
, publishers Caresse
Mary Phelps Jacob
Caresse Crosby , born Mary Phelps Jacob , was an American patron of the arts, poet, publisher, and peace activist...
and Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby was an American heir, a bon vivant, poet, publisher, and for some, epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a member of the Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J....
, art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...
, Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach
Sylvia Beach , born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and II.-Early life:...
(the bookstore owner who published James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...
), painters Tamara de Lempicka
Tamara de Lempicka
Tamara de Lempicka , born Maria Górska in Moscow, in the Russian Empire, was a Polish Art Deco painter and "the first woman artist to be a glamour star."- Early life :...
and Marie Laurencin
Marie Laurencin
Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. -Biography:Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres...
and dancer Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan was a dancer, considered by many to be the creator of modern dance. Born in the United States, she lived in Western Europe and the Soviet Union from the age of 22 until her death at age 50. In the United States she was popular only in New York, and only later in her life...
.
In the late 20s Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness.- Life :...
drew a crowd after her novel The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" is apparent from an early age...
had been banned in the UK. A reading by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work...
packed the salon in 1932. At another Friday salon in the 1930s Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music...
sang from Four Saints in Three Acts
Four Saints in Three Acts
Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera by American composer Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Written in 1927-8, it contains about 20 saints, and is in at least four acts...
, an opera based on a libretto by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
.
Of the famous Modernist writers who spent time in Paris, Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
never made an appearance at the salon. James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
came once or twice but didn't care for it. Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
never attended a Friday, though he did come to 20, Rue Jacob once to talk with Barney about lesbian culture whilst doing research for In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
. His visit was delayed repeatedly owing to his poor health, and when the meeting finally did happen he was too nervous to bring up the subject he had come to talk about.
Epigrams and novel
Éparpillements (Scatterings, 1910) was Barney's first collection of pensées—literally, thoughts. This literary form had been associated with salon culture in France since the 17th century, when the genre was perfected at the salon of Madame de SabléMadeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé
Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé , French writer, was the daughter of Gilles de Souvré, marquis de Courtenvaux, tutor of Louis XIII, and marshal of France....
. Barney's pensées, like de Sablé's own Maximes, were short, often one-line epigrams or bon mots such as "There are more evil ears than bad mouths" and "To be married is to be neither alone nor together."
Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...
, a French poet, literary critic, and philosopher who had become a recluse after contracting the disfiguring disease lupus vulgaris
Lupus vulgaris
Lupus vulgaris are painful cutaneous tuberculosis skin lesions with nodular appearance, most often on the face around nose, eyelids, lips, cheeks and ears. The lesions may ultimately develop into disfiguring skin ulcers if left untreated...
in his thirties. He was impressed enough to invite her to one of the Sunday gatherings at his home, at which he usually received only a small group of old friends. She was a rejuvenating influence in his life, coaxing him out for evening car rides, dinners at the Rue Jacob, a masked ball
Ball (dance)
A ball is a formal dance. The word 'ball' is derived from the Latin word "ballare", meaning 'to dance'; the term also derived into "bailar", which is the Spanish and Portuguese word for dance . In Catalan it is the same word, 'ball', for the dance event.Attendees wear evening attire, which is...
, even a short cruise on the Seine
Seine
The Seine is a -long river and an important commercial waterway within the Paris Basin in the north of France. It rises at Saint-Seine near Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plateau, flowing through Paris and into the English Channel at Le Havre . It is navigable by ocean-going vessels...
. He turned some of their wide-ranging conversations into a series of letters that he published in the Mercure de France
Mercure de France
The Mercure de France was originally a French gazette and literary magazine first published in the 17th century, but after several incarnations has evolved as a publisher, and is now part of the Éditions Gallimard publishing group....
, addressing her as l'Amazone, a French word that can mean either horsewoman or Amazon
Amazons
The Amazons are a nation of all-female warriors in Greek mythology and Classical antiquity. Herodotus placed them in a region bordering Scythia in Sarmatia...
; the letters were later collected in book form. He died in 1915, but the nickname he gave her would stay with her all her life—even her tombstone identifies her as "the Amazon of Remy de Gourmont"—and his Letters to the Amazon left readers wanting to know more about the woman who had inspired them.
Barney obliged in 1920 with Pensées d'une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon), her most overtly political work. In the first section, "Sexual Adversity, War, and Feminism", she developed feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
and pacifist
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
themes, describing war as an "involuntary and collective suicide ordained by man". In war, she said, men "father death as women mother life, with courage and without choice". The epigrammatic form makes it difficult to determine the details of Barney's views; ideas are presented only to be dropped, and some pensées seem to contradict others. Some critics interpret her as saying that the aggression that leads to war is visible in all male relationships. Karla Jay, however, argues that her philosophy was not that sweeping, and is better summed up by the epigram "Those who love war lack the love of an adequate sport—the art of living."
Another section of Pensées d'une Amazone, "Misunderstanding, or Sappho's Lawsuit", gathered historical writings about homosexuality along with her own commentary. She also covered topics such as alcohol, friendship, old age, and literature, writing "Novels are longer than life" and "Romanticism is a childhood ailment; those who had it young are the most robust." A third volume, Nouvelles Pensées de l'Amazone (New Thoughts of the Amazon), appeared in 1939.
The One Who is Legion, or A.D.'s After-Life (1930) was Barney's only book written entirely in English, as well as her only novel. Illustrated by Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard , was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray...
, it concerns a suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
, known only as A.D., who is brought back to life as a hermaphroditic
Hermaphrodite
In biology, a hermaphrodite is an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes.Many taxonomic groups of animals do not have separate sexes. In these groups, hermaphroditism is a normal condition, enabling a form of sexual reproduction in which both...
being and reads the book of her own life. This book-within-a-book
Fictional book
A fictional book is a book that sometimes provides the basis of the plot of a story, a common thread in a series of books, or the works of a particular writer or canon of work. A fictional book may also be used as a mode of conceit to illustrate a story within a story.-Prominent fictional...
, entitled The Love-Lives of A.D., is a collection of hymns, poems and epigrams, much like Barney's own other writings.
Major relationships
Barney practiced, and advocated, what would today be called polyamoryPolyamory
Polyamory is the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved....
. As early as 1901, in Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs, she argued in favor of multiple relationships and against jealousy; in Éparpillements she wrote "One is unfaithful to those one loves in order that their charm does not become mere habit." While she could be jealous herself, she actively encouraged at least some of her lovers to be non-monogamous as well.
Due in part to Jean Chalon's early biography of her, published in English as Portrait of a Seductress, she had become more widely known for her many relationships than for her writing or her salon. She once wrote out a list, divided into three categories: liaisons, demi-liaisons, and adventures. Colette
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
was a demi-liaison, while the artist and furniture designer Eyre de Lanux
Eyre de Lanux
Eyre de Lanux, born Elizabeth Eyre, , was an American artist, writer, and art deco designer who created lacquered furniture and geometric patterned rugs in Paris during the 1920s...
, with whom she had an off-and-on affair for several years, was listed as an adventure. Among the liaisons—the relationships that she considered most important—were Olive Custance
Olive Custance
Olive Eleanor Custance was a British poet. She was part of the aesthetic movement of the 1890s, and a contributor to The Yellow Book....
, Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn was a British poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school...
, Elisabeth de Gramont
Elisabeth de Gramont
Antoinette Corisande Élisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre was a French writer of the early 20th century, best known for her long-term lesbian relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney...
, Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard , was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray...
, and Dolly Wilde
Dolly Wilde
Dorothy Ierne Wilde, known as Dolly Wilde, was an Anglo-Irish socialite, made famous by her family connections and her reputation as a witty conversationalist...
. Of these, the three longest relationships were with de Gramont, Brooks, and Wilde; from 1927, she was involved with all three of them simultaneously, a situation that ended only with Wilde's death. Her shorter affairs, such as those with Colette and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was a French journalist, poet, novelist, sculptor, historian and designer...
, often evolved into lifelong friendships.
Elisabeth de Gramont
Henry IV of France
Henry IV , Henri-Quatre, was King of France from 1589 to 1610 and King of Navarre from 1572 to 1610. He was the first monarch of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty in France....
, she had grown up among the aristocracy; when she was a child, according to Janet Flanner, "peasants on her farm... begged her not to clean her shoes before entering their houses". She looked back on this lost world of wealth and privilege with little regret, and became known as the "red duchess" for her support of socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
. She was married and had two daughters in 1910, when she met Natalie Barney; her husband is said to have been violent and tyrannical. They eventually separated, and in 1918 she and Barney wrote up a marriage contract stating that "[n]o one union shall be so strong as this union, nor another joining so tender—nor relationship so lasting."
De Gramont accepted Barney's nonmonogamy—perhaps reluctantly at first—and went out of her way to be gracious to her other lovers, always including Romaine Brooks when she invited Barney to vacation in the country. The relationship continued until de Gramont's death in 1954.
Romaine Brooks
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard , was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray...
, whom she met around 1914. Brooks specialized in portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
ure and was noted for her somber palette of gray, black, and white. During the 1920s she painted portraits of several members of Barney's social circle, including de Gramont and Barney herself.
Brooks tolerated Barney's casual affairs well enough to tease her about them, and had a few of her own over the years, but could become jealous when a new love became serious. Usually she simply left town, but at one point she gave Barney an ultimatum to choose between her and Dolly Wilde—relenting once Barney had given in. At the same time, while Brooks was devoted to Barney, she did not want to live with her as a full-time couple; she disliked Paris, disdained Barney's friends, hated the constant socializing on which Barney thrived, and felt that she was fully herself only when alone. To accommodate Brooks's need for solitude they built a summer home consisting of two separate wings joined by a dining room, which they called Villa Trait d'Union, the hyphenated villa. Brooks also spent much of the year in Italy or travelling elsewhere in Europe, away from Barney. They remained devoted to one another for over fifty years.
Dolly Wilde
Dolly WildeDolly Wilde
Dorothy Ierne Wilde, known as Dolly Wilde, was an Anglo-Irish socialite, made famous by her family connections and her reputation as a witty conversationalist...
was the niece of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
and the last of her family to bear the Wilde name. She was renowned for her epigrammatic wit but, unlike her famous uncle, never managed to apply her gifts to any publishable writing; her letters are her only legacy. She did some work as a translator and was often supported by others, including Natalie Barney, whom she met in 1927.
Like Vivien, Wilde seemed bent on self-destruction. She drank heavily, was addicted to heroin, and attempted suicide several times. Barney financed detoxifications, which were never effective; she emerged from one nursing-home stay with a new dependency on the sleeping draught paraldehyde
Paraldehyde
Paraldehyde is the cyclic trimer of acetaldehyde molecules. Formally, it is a derivative of 1,3,5-trioxane. The corresponding tetramer is metaldehyde. A colourless liquid, it is sparingly soluble in water and highly soluble in alcohol. Paraldehyde slowly oxidizes in air, turning brown and producing...
, then available over-the-counter.
In 1939 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused surgery, seeking alternative treatments. The following year, World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
separated her from Barney; she fled Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
for England while Barney went to Italy with Brooks. She died in 1941 from causes that have never been fully explained, possibly a paraldehyde overdose.
World War II and after
Barney's attitudes during World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
have been controversial. In 1937, Una, Lady Troubridge
Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge
Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge was a British sculptor and translator. She is best known as the long-time partner of Marguerite "John" Radclyffe-Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness.Troubridge was an educated woman who had many achievements in her own right...
had complained that Barney "talked a lot of half-baked nonsense about the tyranny of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
". Barney herself was one-eighth Jewish, and since she spent the war in Italy with Romaine Brooks, risked deportation to a concentration camp—a fate she avoided only by wiring
Telegraphy
Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages via some form of signalling technology. Telegraphy requires messages to be converted to a code which is known to both sender and receiver...
her sister Laura for a notarized
Notary public
A notary public in the common law world is a public officer constituted by law to serve the public in non-contentious matters usually concerned with estates, deeds, powers-of-attorney, and foreign and international business...
document attesting to her confirmation. Nevertheless, having no other source of information about the war, she believed Axis
Axis Powers
The Axis powers , also known as the Axis alliance, Axis nations, Axis countries, or just the Axis, was an alignment of great powers during the mid-20th century that fought World War II against the Allies. It began in 1936 with treaties of friendship between Germany and Italy and between Germany and...
propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
that portrayed the Allies
Allies
In everyday English usage, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out between them...
as the aggressors, so that pro-Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
seemed to her to be a logical consequence of her pacifism
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
. An unpublished memoir she wrote during the war years is pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic, quoting speeches by Hitler, apparently with approval.
It is possible that the anti-Semitic passages in her memoir were intended to be used as evidence that she was not Jewish; alternatively, she may have been influenced by Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
's anti-Semitic radio broadcasts. Whatever the case, she did help a Jewish couple escape Italy, providing passage on a ship to the United States. By the end of the war her sympathies had again changed, and she saw the Allies as liberators.
Villa Trait d'Union was destroyed by bombing. After the war, Brooks declined to live with Barney in Paris; she remained in Italy, and they visited each other frequently. Their relationship remained monogamous until the mid-1950s, when Barney met her last new love, Janine Lahovary, the wife of a retired Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
n ambassador. Lahovary made a point of winning Romaine Brooks's friendship, Barney reassured Brooks that their relationship still came first, and the triangle appeared to be stable.
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
was an intermittent guest for almost ten years; he described the decor as "totally turn-of-the-century" and remembered that Barney introduced him to the models for several characters in Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
's In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. His most prominent work, it is popularly known for its considerable length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine." The novel is widely...
. Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century.-Early life, relationship with Gertrude Stein:...
became a regular after Gertrude Stein's death in 1946. Fridays in the 1960s honored Mary McCarthy
Mary McCarthy (author)
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American author, critic and political activist.- Early life :Born in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy and his wife, the former Therese Preston, McCarthy was orphaned at the age of six when both her parents died in the great flu epidemic of 1918...
and Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar
Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist and essayist. Winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize, she was the first woman elected to the Académie française, in 1980, and the seventeenth person to occupy Seat 3.-Biography:Yourcenar was born Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie...
, who in 1980—eight years after Barney's death—became the first female member of the French Academy.
Barney did not return to writing epigrams, but did publish two volumes of memoirs about other writers she had known, Souvenirs Indiscrets (Indiscreet Memories, 1960) and Traits et Portraits (Traits and Portraits, 1963). She also worked to find a publisher for Brooks's memoirs and to place her paintings in galleries.
In the late 1960s Brooks became increasingly reclusive and paranoid; she sank into a depression and refused to see the doctors Barney sent. Bitter at Lahovary's presence during their last years, which she had hoped they would spend exclusively together, she finally broke off contact with Barney. Barney continued to write to her, but received no replies. Brooks died in December 1970, and Barney on February 2, 1972 of heart failure.
Legacy
By the end of Barney's life her work had been largely forgotten. In 1979, Nathalie Barney was honored with a place setting in Judy ChicagoJudy Chicago
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, author, and educator.Chicago has been creating artwork since the mid 1960s. Her earliest forays into the art world coincided with the rise of Minimalism, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art she believed to have greater content and relevance...
's feminist work of art The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by feminist artist Judy Chicago depicting place settings for 39 mythical and historical famous women. It was produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration and was first exhibited in 1979. Subsequently, despite art world resistance, it toured to 16 venues...
. In the 1980s Barney began to be recognized for what Karla Jay calls an "almost uncanny anticipation" of the concerns of later feminist writers. English translations of some of her memoirs, essays, and epigrams appeared in 1992, but most of her plays and poetry are still untranslated.
Her indirect influence on literature, through her salon and her many literary friendships, can be seen in the number of writers who have addressed or portrayed her in their works. Claudine S'en Va (Claudine and Annie, 1903) by Colette
Colette
Colette was the surname of the French novelist and performer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette . She is best known for her novel Gigi, upon which Lerner and Loewe based the stage and film musical comedies of the same title.-Early life and marriage:Colette was born to retired military officer Jules-Joseph...
contains a brief appearance by Barney as "Miss Flossie," echoing the nickname she had earlier been given in de Pougy's novel Idylle Saphique. Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn was a British poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school...
wrote many poems about her, as well as a Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
novel, Une Femme M'Apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904), in which she is described as having "eyes ... as sharp and blue as a blade.... The charm of peril emanated from her and drew me inexorably." Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont
Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...
addressed her in his Letters to the Amazon, and Truman Capote
Truman Capote
Truman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
mentioned her in his last, unfinished novel Answered Prayers
Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel
Answered Prayers is an unfinished novel by American author Truman Capote, published posthumously in 1986 in England and in 1987 in the United States.- History :...
. She also appeared in two later novels by writers who never met her: Francesco Rapazzini's Un Soir chez l'Amazone (An Evening with the Amazon, 2004) is a historical novel about Barney's salon, while Anna Livia's Minimax (1991) portrays both her and Renee Vivien as still-living vampires.
According to Lillian Faderman, "There was probably no lesbian in the four decades between 1928 and the late 1960s capable of reading English or any of the eleven languages into which the book was translated who was unfamiliar with The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness
The Well of Loneliness is a 1928 lesbian novel by the British author Radclyffe Hall. It follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family whose "sexual inversion" is apparent from an early age...
." Although the novel's author, Radclyffe Hall, intended it as an argument for greater tolerance for what she called "sexual inverts
Sexual inversion (sexology)
Sexual inversion is a term used by sexologists, primarily in the late 19th and early 20th century, to refer to homosexuality. Sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits: male inverts were, to a greater or lesser degree, inclined to traditionally female pursuits and...
", it has often been criticized by lesbian readers for its protagonist's self-hatred and its use of terms like "freak" and "mistake of nature". Barney, as the salon hostess Valérie Seymour, appears in the novel as the symbol of a different attitude. "Valérie, placid and self-assured, created an atmosphere of courage; everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour's."
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was a French journalist, poet, novelist, sculptor, historian and designer...
wrote love poems to Barney in the early years of the century, and in 1930 depicted her in a novel, L'Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts), in which she said she "analyzed and described Natalie at length as well as the life into which she initiated me". The protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
of the novel is a hermaphrodite
Hermaphrodite
In biology, a hermaphrodite is an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes.Many taxonomic groups of animals do not have separate sexes. In these groups, hermaphroditism is a normal condition, enabling a form of sexual reproduction in which both...
named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées
Party
A party is a gathering of people who have been invited by a host for the purposes of socializing, conversation, or recreation. A party will typically feature food and beverages, and often music and dancing as well....
. Barney is Laurette Wells, a salon hostess who spends much of the novel trying to win back an ex-lover loosely based on Renée Vivien. The book's portrayal of her is, at times, harshly critical, but she is the only person whose company Marion enjoys. He/she tells Wells that she is "perverse... dissolute, self-centered, unfair, stubborn, sometimes miserly... [but] a genuine rebel, ever ready to incite others to rebellion.... [Y]ou are capable of loving someone just as they are, even a thief—in that lies your only fidelity. And so you have my respect."
After meeting Barney in the 1930s, the Russian poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva addressed her in a Letter to the Amazon (1934) in which she expressed her conflicted feelings about love between women. The result, according to Terry Castle
Terry Castle
Terry Castle is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," has published eight books, including the anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award...
, is "an entirely cryptic, paranoid, overwhelming piece of reverie".
Barney and the women in her social circle are the subject of Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
's Ladies Almanack
Ladies Almanack
Ladies Almanack, or Ladies Almanack: showing their Signs and their Tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers, written & illustrated by a lady of fashion, written by Djuna Barnes in...
(1928), a roman à clef
Roman à clef
Roman à clef or roman à clé , French for "novel with a key", is a phrase used to describe a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction...
written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style, with Barnes' own illustrations in the style of Elizabethan woodcut
Woodcut
Woodcut—occasionally known as xylography—is a relief printing artistic technique in printmaking in which an image is carved into the surface of a block of wood, with the printing parts remaining level with the surface while the non-printing parts are removed, typically with gouges...
s. She has the lead role as Dame Evangeline Musset, "who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Parts, and in whatsoever Parts did suffer them most, lament Cruelly". "[A] Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty"; she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood. Also appearing pseudonymously are Elisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks
Romaine Brooks, born Beatrice Romaine Goddard , was an American painter who worked mostly in Paris and Capri. She specialized in portraiture and used a subdued palette dominated by the color gray...
, Dolly Wilde
Dolly Wilde
Dorothy Ierne Wilde, known as Dolly Wilde, was an Anglo-Irish socialite, made famous by her family connections and her reputation as a witty conversationalist...
, Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness.- Life :...
and her partner Una, Lady Troubridge, Janet Flanner
Janet Flanner
Janet Flanner was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975. She wrote under the pen name "Genêt"...
and Solita Solano, and Mina Loy
Mina Loy
Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S...
. The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barney herself loved the book and reread it throughout her life.
On October 26, 2009, Barney was honored with a historical marker
Historical marker
A historical marker or historic marker is an indicator such as a plaque or sign to commemorate an event or person of historic interest and to associate that point of interest with a specific locale one can visit.-Description:...
in her home town of Dayton, Ohio
Dayton, Ohio
Dayton is the 6th largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Montgomery County, the fifth most populous county in the state. The population was 141,527 at the 2010 census. The Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 841,502 in the 2010 census...
. The marker is the first in Ohio to note the sexual orientation of its honoree. This plaque was vandalized in July 2010.
Works in French
- Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de FemmesQuelques Portraits-Sonnets de FemmesQuelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes is a poetry chapbook, by Natalie Clifford Barney, with watercolor illustrations by Alice Pike Barney.It was published in an edition of 500, by Librarie Paul Ollendorf....
(Paris: Ollendorf, 1900) - Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (Paris: La Plume, 1901; as "Tryphé")
- Actes et entr'actes (Paris: Sansot, 1910)
- Je me souviens (Paris: Sansot, 1910)
- Eparpillements (Paris: Sansot, 1910)
- Pensées d'une Amazone (Paris: Emile Paul, 1920)
- Aventures de l'Esprit (Paris: Emile Paul, 1929)
- Nouvelles Pensées de l'Amazone (Paris: Mercure de France, 1939)
- Souvenirs Indiscrets (Paris: Flammarion, 1960)
- Traits et Portraits (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963)
Works in English
- Poems & Poèmes: Autres Alliances (Paris: Emile Paul, New York: Doran, 1920) – bilingual collection of poetry
- The One Who Is Legion (London: Eric Partridge, Ltd., 1930; Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1987)
English translations
- A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (New Victoria Publishers, 1992); edited and translated by Anna LiviaAnna Livia Julian BrawnAnna Livia Julian Brawn ,who used the pen name Anna Livia for her novels, was a "widely read lesbian feminist writer and linguistic theorist", well-known for her fiction and non-fiction regarding issues of sexuality...
- Adventures of the Mind (New York University Press, 1992); trans. John Spalding Gatton
External links
- The Temple of Friendship at ruevisconti.com (French language, dozens of photos)