Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), American-born Parisian literary great, is well-known for several reasons. She inspired scores of authors, including Truman Capote and Renée Vivien; she formed L’Académie des Femmes as a protest against the male French Academy; and she was openly lesbian.[1] She even inspired the famous novel by Radclyffe Hall The Well of Loneliness (1928).[2] Her leftist ideals were intertwined with her taste for classical literature.
Born in Ohio to extremely rich parents, Barney came into contact with various LGBTQ+ icons and figures from the international left throughout her childhood. At the age of five, staying at the Long Beach Hotel in New York, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) saved her from a group of boys chasing her, then sat her down and told her a story. Wilde is said to have been an important inspiration for Barney throughout her life.
Attending boarding school in France, at a school founded by Marie Souvestre (1830-1905), Barney caused great alarm whenever she was home, now Washington D.C. She was regularly mentioned in Washington newspapers, particularly when she was caught riding astride a horse (rather than the customary sidesaddle for women) in her twenties. But she caused far more drama when, in 1899, at the age of twenty-three, she saw famous courtesan Liane de Pougy (1869-1950) and approached her at her house, calling herself a ‘page of love’ whom Sappho had sent to her.[3]
Barney had a number of high-profile relationships with relatively famous women of the period,[4] including Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874-1952). While in these relationships, she wrote works with heavy allusions to Sappho, and wrote a play about the poet’s life, while learning Ancient Greek in order to read the poems in their original fragments, and even living on Lesbos, discussing the foundation of the school for women there, as Sappho was rumoured to have done.[5]
From her very first work, in 1900, Barney was associated with the ancient world. Her first collection of poems, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (1900), was full of her love for women, and, while many reviewers ignored the Sapphic ideas, one society gossip paper called her ‘Sappho’, which led to her father buying and destroying the remaining copies of the book.[6] Her next text, Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs (1901), was published under the pen-name Tryphé, and contained a description of Sappho as well as an argument for paganism – and, after her father’s death, she was free to publish under her own name again.
She hosted a literary salon in France throughout the 1900s, famous for its varied occupants and visitors, and its performances. This soon became politicised, though, when, in the First World War, conscientious objectors and anti-war protestors would gather, such as Henri Barbusse (1873), Oscar Milosz (1877-1939), and Alan Seeger (1888-1916). Indeed, André Gide (1947) also visited, along with Isadora Duncan (1877/1878-1927), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), and Sylvia Beach (1887-1962). She made various friends in Paris, including Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915), whom she was especially close with, and who referred to her as l’Amazone in his publications in Mercure de France – a nickname that stuck.
In 1920, she wrote Pensées d’une Amazone, in which she vaunted her pacifist and feminist views, and a positive defence of homosexuality. She actively used her personae of Sappho and an Amazon to advance those progressive views which those figures have popularly come to enshrine. During World War Two, however, she was influenced Nazi propaganda and felt for a time that fascism was complementary to her pacificism. She later switched her allegiance back to antifascism and the Allies.[7] Barney used her self-identification and creative engagement with ancient themes and literature (particularly Sappho) to advance (usually) progressive views on war, on feminism, and sexuality.
This profile was written by Anna Coopey
[1] For a more in-depth exploration of her general life, see Rodriguez, Suzanne (1962): Wild Heart: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris (Ecco).
[2] Hall, Radclyffe (1928): The Well of Loneliness (Penguin Modern Classics).
[3] They went on to have an on-and-off affair, which Pougy wrote Idylle Saphique (1901) about, and Barney wrote Lettres à une Connue (2005). In Souhami’s (2005) translation, she writes the following: ‘My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.’
[4] Those not mentioned below include: Élisabeth de Gramont (1875-1954), Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), Dolly Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s niece, 1895-1941), and Renée Vivien (real name Pauline Tarn, 1877-1909), on whom see Jay, Karla (1988): The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renee Vivien (Indiana University Press).
[5] She wrote one play, called Équivoque (1910), which changed the myth of Sappho’s suicide for the love of Phaon to her killing herself because Phaon is marrying her girlfriend.
[6] See Rodriguez, Suzanne (1962): Wild Heart: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris (Ecco) p. 128.
[7] See Livia, Anna (1992): A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (New Victoria Publishing) pp. 192-193.
