page_title: Natalie Clifford Barney
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Natalie Clifford Barney / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: the Barney historical marker in Cooper Park, downtown Dayton. Later vandalized in July 2010.Historic Marker Vandalized In Cooper Park - News Story - WHIO Dayton
context_page_description: 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's 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". She wrote in both French and English. 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.
context_section_description: By the end of Natalie Barney's life her work had been largely forgotten. In 1979, Barney was honored with a place setting in Judy Chicago's feminist work of art The Dinner Party. In the 1980s Barney began to be recognized for what Karla Jay calls an "almost uncanny anticipation" of the concerns of later feminist writers. English translations of some of her memoirs, essays, and epigrams appeared in 1992, but most of her plays and poetry are still untranslated.
  Her indirect influence on literature, through her salon and her many literary friendships, can be seen in the number of writers who have addressed or portrayed her in their works.  Claudine S'en Va (Claudine and Annie, 1903) by Colette contains a brief appearance by Barney as "Miss Flossie," echoing the nickname she had earlier been given in de Pougy's novel Idylle Saphique.  Renée Vivien wrote many poems about her, as well as a Symbolist novel, Une Femme M'Apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904), in which she is described as having "eyes ... as sharp and blue as a blade.... The charm of peril emanated from her and drew me inexorably." Remy de Gourmont addressed her in his Letters to the Amazon, and Truman Capote mentioned her in his last, unfinished novel Answered Prayers.  She also appeared in two later novels by writers who never met her: Francesco Rapazzini's Un Soir chez l'Amazone (An Evening with the Amazon, 2004) is a historical novel about Barney's salon, while Anna Livia's Minimax (1991) portrays both her and Renee Vivien as still-living vampires.
  According to Lillian Faderman, "There was probably no lesbian in the four decades between 1928 and the late 1960s capable of reading English or any of the eleven languages into which the book was translated who was unfamiliar with The Well of Loneliness." Although the novel's author, Radclyffe Hall, intended it as an argument for greater tolerance for what she called "sexual inverts", it has often been criticized by lesbian readers for its protagonist's self-hatred and its use of terms like "freak" and "mistake of nature". Barney, as the salon hostess Valérie Seymour, appears in the novel as the symbol of a different attitude.  "Valérie, placid and self-assured, created an atmosphere of courage; everyone felt very normal and brave when they gathered together at Valérie Seymour's."
  Lucie Delarue-Mardrus wrote love poems to Barney in the early years of the century, and in 1930 depicted her in a novel, L'Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts), in which she said she "analyzed and described Natalie at length as well as the life into which she initiated me".  The protagonist of the novel is a hermaphrodite named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées. Barney is Laurette Wells, a salon hostess who spends much of the novel trying to win back an ex-lover loosely based on Renée Vivien. The book's portrayal of her is, at times, harshly critical, but she is the only person whose company Marion enjoys.  Marion tells Wells that she is "perverse... dissolute, self-centered, unfair, stubborn, sometimes miserly... [but] a genuine rebel, ever ready to incite others to rebellion.... [Y]ou are capable of loving someone just as they are, even a thief—in that lies your only fidelity.  And so you have my respect."
  After meeting Barney in the 1930s, the Russian poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva addressed her in a Letter to the Amazon (1934) in which she expressed her conflicted feelings about love between women.  The result, according to Terry Castle, is "an entirely cryptic, paranoid, overwhelming piece of reverie".
  Barney and the women in her social circle are the subject of Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack (1928), a roman à clef written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style, with Barnes' own illustrations in the style of Elizabethan woodcuts.  She has the lead role as Dame Evangeline Musset, "who was in her Heart one Grand Red Cross for the Pursuance, the Relief and the Distraction, of such Girls as in their Hinder Parts, and their Fore Par
caption: Historical marker honoring Barney, in Dayton's Cooper Park
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