Natalie Clifford Barney

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Standard Name: Barney, Natalie Clifford
Birth Name: Natalie Clifford Barney
Nickname: l'Amazone
Nickname: l'imperatrice des lesbiennes
Pseudonym: Florence Temple-Bradford
Pseudonym: Tryphê
Used Form: Tryphe
Natalie Clifford Barney , though American, is best known as a Paris salonnière. She specialized in memoirs and pensées, though she also produced poetry, drama, novels, essays, and dialogues. Writing primarily in French but also sometimes in English, she appropriated the epigrammatic tradition of Pascal , La Rochefoucauld , and Wilde for a female subject matter.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
295
Much of her work celebrates sapphic love from a frankly autobiographical perspective. Her numerous sketches of writers and intellectuals, along with her fictionalized appearances in several works by others, attest to her prominent role in creating and extending Modernist literary networks.
Half-length painting of Natalie Clifford Barney by her mother, Alice Pike Barney, 1896. She faces the viewer directly: blonde, blue-eyed, wearing a black dress, fur cape, and blue velvet hat with a tall feather. Her hair, divided in the centre, is roughly brushed back.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Wealth and Poverty Djuna Barnes
By this time she relied on stipends from Peggy Guggenheim and Natalie Barney in order to live. She also received money from Samuel Beckett , Janet Flanner , and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
Travel Anna Wickham
In an attempt to recover from her son's death, AW travelled to Paris, where she met Natalie Barney and other prominent literary figures.
Hepburn, James et al. “Anna Wickham: A Memoir”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, pp. 1-48.
21
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Hepburn, James, and Anna Wickham. “Preface”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith and Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, p. xix - xxiii.
xxi
Textual Production Anna Wickham
Many of AW 's papers and letters—including most of Natalie Barney 's letters to her—were lost when Wickham's attic was destroyed by a fire-bomb in 1943.
Schenck, Celeste. “Anna Wickham”. The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, Indiana University Press, pp. 613-17.
614
Hepburn, James et al. “Editor’s Note and Acknowledgements”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, p. xxv - xxvi.
xxvi
Hepburn, James et al. “Anna Wickham: A Memoir”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, pp. 1-48.
28
Some of her letters to Natalie Barney
Textual Production Mina Loy
ML delivered an informal lecture on Gertrude Stein at Natalie Barney 's Académie des femmes.
Loy, Mina. “Introduction and Time-Table”. The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, Carcanet, p. xv - lxxix.
lxxiii
Textual Production Anna Livia
In this text Minnie and her family return somewhat changed. While all of Minnie's relatives have taken male lovers (all named John, perhaps in honour of the name by which Radclyffe Hall liked to be...
Textual Production Anna Livia
In 1992, Anna Livia edited and translated the collection A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney. In 1995, she did the same with Lucie Delarue-Mardrus 's novel The Angel and the Perverts...
Textual Production Anna Livia
Anna Livia contributed entries on Natalie Barney and Elana Dykewomon to The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (1994), as well as entries for Bonnie Zimmerman 's Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (2000) on Natalie Barney
Textual Production Gertrude Stein
GS opens this text with the flat assertion that Alice B. Toklas did hers now anybody will do theirs.
Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. Random House.
3
Once again, then, she purposely confused the boundaries of the self in autobiography.Because fame had...
Textual Features Radclyffe Hall
The Well of Loneliness contains elements of the roman à clef. Two of its characters, Valérie Seymour and Jonathan Brockett, are based on Natalie Barney and Noël Coward .
Cline, Sally. Radclyffe Hall: A Woman Called John. John Murray.
83, 269
The Breakspeare Unit draws...
Textual Features Djuna Barnes
Structured as a monthly chronicle, Ladies Almanack is a satiric lesbian cosmology based on Natalie Barney and her circle in Paris. Among its characters are Patience Scalpel, based on Mina Loy , Lady Buck-and-Balk and...
Residence Ezra Pound
EP lived in Paris, where he formed associations with many other expatriate writers including Gertrude Stein , Ernest Hemingway , and Natalie Barney .
Nadel, Ira Bruce, editor. “Chronology; Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, Cambridge University Press, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
4
Publishing Gertrude Stein
The consecutive volumes of the Yale Edition of Gertrude Stein's Unpublished Writings came out yearly thereafter. The second volume, Mrs. Reynolds, was published on 17 September 1952.
Wilson, Robert Alfred. Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography. Phoenix Bookshop.
59-60
Bee Time Vine came out on...
politics Anna Wickham
Although her feminist sympathies are evident in her poetry and in her friendships, AW seems to have had little formal involvement with the suffrage movement or other forms of organised feminism. She hosted occasional suffrage...
Occupation Honoré de Balzac
Mary Russell Mitford translated some of Balzac's works. His oeuvre influenced many writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon , Storm Jameson , and Natalie Clifford Barney , and has attracted criticism from Anita Brookner .
Literary responses Hope Mirrlees
Julia Briggs reads the text as a roman à clef in which Scudéry is an unflattering portrait of Natalie Barney (whom HM would have encountered when herself living in Paris) while Harrison appears as the...

Timeline

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Texts

Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Karla Jay. A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney. Translator Anna Livia, New Victoria Publishers, 1992.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Actes et entr’actes. Sansot, 1910.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Aventures de l’esprit. Émile-Paul Frères, 1929.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Cinq petits dialogues grecs. La Plume, 1902.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Éparpillements. Sansot, 1910.
Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Gertrude Stein. “Foreword”. As Fine as Melanctha, Yale University Press, 1954, p. vii - xix.
Jay, Karla, and Natalie Clifford Barney. “Introduction”. A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney, translated by. Anna Livia and Anna Livia, New Victoria Publishers, 1992, p. i - xiv.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Je me souviens. Sansot, 1910.
Chalon, Jean, and Natalie Clifford Barney. “Note”. Un panier de framboises, Mercure de France, 1979, pp. 41-3.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Nouvelles pensées de l’Amazone. Mercure de France, 1939.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Pensées d’une Amazone. Émile Paul, 1920.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Poems & poèmes. Émile-Paul Frères and George H. Doran, 1920.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes. Ollendorf, 1900.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Souvenirs indiscrets. Flammarion, 1960.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. The One Who Is Legion, or A. D.’s After-Life. Eric Partridge, 1930.
Jay, Karla et al. “The Trouble with Heroines: Natalie Clifford Barney and Anti-Semitism”. A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney, translated by. Anna Livia, New Victoria Publishers, 1992, pp. 181-98.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Traits et portraits, suivi de L’amour défendu. Mercure de France, 1963.
Barney, Natalie Clifford. Un panier de framboises. Mercure de France, 1979.