Natalie Clifford Barney

Barney resided in Paris most of her adult life. Known for her literary salons, she published her first book of love poems, Queleques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes(Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women) in 1900, a book critically well received, if misrepresented in the press. She lived openly as a polyamorous lesbian, maintaining a 50-plus year relationship with American painter Romaine Brooks, while sustaining romances with poets and dancers. Her life inspired authors to create characters as that in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. In Mecure de France the French poet, philosopher, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont nicknamed Ms. Barney, l’Amazone, a reference to the fabled women warriors recounted by the Greeks, and an endearment later etched on her tombstone. In 1920 her Pensees d’une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon) in turn established her fierce feminism and commitment to pacifism, “describing war as an ‘involuntary and collective suicide ordained by man’” (Benstock, 1986, p. 296).

Barney published Actes et Entr’actes (Acts and Interludes, 1910), a collection of short plays and poems that included Equivoque (Ambiguity), in which she revised Sappho’s death to depict her leaping from a cliff in remorseful grieving in the face of Phaon marrying the woman she loved. In Aventures de l’Esprit (Adventures of the Mind, 1929), Barney mapped the Parisian Latin Quarter property she would occupy for over 40 years, from its Doric Temple of Friendship to the hundred-plus illuminati who frequented her Salons.

Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986.

“Lesbian Literary Figure Honored with Ohio Historial Marker Noting Sexual Orientation.” The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com, 26 October 2009.

Livia, Anna. “Barney, Natalie Clifford (1876-1972).” glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. 27 January 2005. http://www.glbtq.com, 8 October 2009.