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.
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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
Education Dorothy Bussy
Marie Souvestre was a free-thinking feminist, daughter of the French author and philosopher Emile Souvestre . Her school, Les Ruches, was widely admired for its academic rigour. It educated many outstanding women, including Beatrice Chamberlain
Cultural formation Colette
Born into the French upper class and married into fashionable circles, Colette became notorious for her promiscuity. She had well-publicized affairs with both men and women, including the eccentric, aristocratic, cross-dressing music-hall performer Mathilde de Mornay, marquise de Belboeuf

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