Natalie Clifford Barney
Natalie Clifford Barney was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris. Barney’s salon was held at her home at 20 rue Jacob in Paris’s Left Bank for more than 60 years. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels written by others.
About Natalie Clifford Barney in brief
Natalie Clifford Barney was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris. Barney’s salon was held at her home at 20 rue Jacob in Paris’s Left Bank for more than 60 years. She was openly lesbian and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900. 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. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels written by others, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Idylle Saphique to The Well of Loneliness, the most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century. 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 also wrote Lettres à unemission, a play on the law of law that is only recognized when the law is in favor of women. She died in Paris in 1998 and is survived by her husband, two children and two grandchildren. She is buried in a suburb of Paris, near her former home on the Left Bank of the Eiffel Tower, where she once lived with her husband and two sisters. Her paintings are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and are on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where they are on view until the end of the year.
For more information, visit: www. Smithsonian.com/Barney and www.nataliecliffordbarney.com. For more on the Lost Generation, go to: http://www.lostgeneration.org/lost-gen.html. The Lost Generation is a collection of works by American and British Modernists of the lost generation, published by Simon & Schuster, from 1876-1915. The Last Generation is published by Penguin Books, priced between $20 and $50. For information on The Lostgeneration, visit www.thelostgen.com or go to www.penguin.co.uk/lostgen/lostgeneration/lostgenerations. In her writings she supported feminism and pacifism. In her early twenties she made headlines by galloping through Bar Harbor while driving a second horse on a lead ahead of her, riding astride instead of sidesaddle. 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. She and her younger sister Laura attended Les Ruches, a French boarding school in Fontainebleau, France, founded by feminist Marie Souvestre, who also founded Allenswood Academy, in Wimbledon, then outside London, which was attended by such notables as Eleanor Roosevelt. When she was five 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.
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