Natalie Clifford Barney

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. 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.