Queer Archives - Page 12 of 20

Mary Shelley

English author of Frankenstein

Sylvia Beach

In addition to owning and running the “bookshop and lending library, Shakespeare and Company,” Beach spent her time advocating and networking for the writers and friends that were loyal to her shop.

While in Paris, Wood’s artistic medium changed from sculpture to silverpoint, in which sketches are drawn with a silver-pointed stylus. Wood’s work consists largely of erotically suggestive flowers and animals. Her sketches have been described as “fluid” and “sensual” by biographers noting, for instance, her representation of frequently fetishized objects like women’s shoes

Gertrude Stein

American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector

Djuna Barnes

She acted and wrote plays for Provincetown Theater in Massachusetts; she also became a highly paid journalist. In 1921, she was sent to Paris by McCall’s Magazine to study and write about the expatriate movement. She became friends with famous writers and artists including Mina Loy. She frequently visited Natalie Barney’s salon, to read and discuss literature. It was the environment at Barney’s salon that inspired Barnes to write Ladies Almanack (American Women).

Jane Heap

American editor, publisher, art gallery owner, and teacher

Janet Flanner

Janet Flanner, who decried the personal “I,” was a technically skilled writer who found diagramming sentences and Parisian newspapers influential.

Natalie Clifford Barney

Barney established a salon at her home that brought together artists of all nationalities, literary movements, and sexual identities; Joan Schenkar, a biographer of Barney’s lover Dorothy Wilde, calls it “the most subversive literary salon that ever existed.”