Natalie Clifford Barney

Author

1876 – 1972

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Who was Natalie Clifford Barney?

Natalie Clifford Barney was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris.

Barney's salon was held at her home at 20 rue Jacob in Paris' Left Bank for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a "Women's Academy" in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont to Truman Capote.

She was openly lesbian and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal as "the best way of getting rid of nuisances". In her writings she supported feminism and pacifism. She opposed monogamy and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships, including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien and dancer Armen Ohanian and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Sapphic Idyll to The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most famous lesbian novel of the 20th century.

Famous Quotes:

  • Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
  • How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue
  • We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
  • Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
  • If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
  • There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
  • Novels are longer than life.
  • Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
  • Lovers should also have their days off.
  • The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.

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Born
Oct 31, 1876
Dayton
Nationality
  • United States of America
Profession
Lived in
  • Dayton
Died
Feb 2, 1972
Paris

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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