Natalie Clifford Barney

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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.

Milestones

31 October 1876

NCB was born in Dayton, Ohio.
Chalon, Jean. Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney. Translator Barko, Carol, Crown.
1
Rood, Karen Lane, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 4. Gale Research.
23

Spring 1900

NCB published her first volume of French verse, Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes, illustrated with four portraits of women by her mother, Alice Pike Barney .
Wickes, George. The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
46
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
273
Chalon, Jean. Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney. Translator Barko, Carol, Crown.
51

1929

NCB published Aventures de l'esprit, a collection of short sketches of well-known writers, including the women who participated in the Académie des Femmes .
Rood, Karen Lane, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 4. Gale Research.
26-7

1963

NCB , at the age of eighty-seven, published her last volume of memoirs and sketches, Traits et portraits, suivi de L'amour défendu, with Mercure de France in Paris.
Rood, Karen Lane, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 4. Gale Research.
23

1:00 am, 2 February 1972

NCB , ninety-five years old, died in bed at the Hotel Meurice in Paris, having gone into a coma three hours earlier.
Chalon, Jean. Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney. Translator Barko, Carol, Crown.
240
Rood, Karen Lane, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 4. Gale Research.
23
Chalon, Jean, and Natalie Clifford Barney. “Note”. Un panier de framboises, Mercure de France, pp. 41-3.
41-2

Biography

Birth and Background

31 October 1876

NCB was born in Dayton, Ohio.
Chalon, Jean. Portrait of a Seductress: The World of Natalie Barney. Translator Barko, Carol, Crown.
1
Rood, Karen Lane, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 4. Gale Research.
23