Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Natalie Clifford Barney
-
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, 1986.
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.
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...
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...
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Edition of Gertrude Stein's Unpublished Writings came out yearly thereafter.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, 1974.
59-60
Bee Time Vine came out on...
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, 1999, pp. xvii - xxxi; 1.
xxi-xxii
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
4
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...
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, 1997.
83, 269
The Breakspeare Unit draws...
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 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, 1990, 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, 1984, 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, 1984, pp. 1-48.
28
Some of her letters to Natalie Barney
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, 1937.
3
Once again, then, she purposely confused the boundaries of the self in autobiography.Because fame had...
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, 1985, p. xv - lxxix.