Natalie Clifford Barney - Infinite Women

Born: 31 October 1876, United States
Died: 2 February 1972
Country most active: France
Also known as: NA

The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) was born to a wealthy railroad car manufacturing family in Dayton, Ohio, though her circle of literary and artistic influence was transatlantic and spanned nearly a century. From the time she was a young girl, Barney had a strong sense of self and identified as a lesbian. She would go on to become an outspoken writer, artist, and host of literary salons for women in her Paris home throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In addition to her highly publicized affairs with other women of her social milieu in Paris, including Liane de Pougy, Eva Palmer, and Renee Vivien, Barney also used these connections to collaborate with these women in their own artistic endeavors. Barney’s work was heavily influenced by Sappho’s fragments and classical Greek aesthetics. Beyond her personal affairs, today Barney is likely known for her literary salon, held in her Paris home from the early 1900s. In addition to hosting an ‘Academie des Femmes’ in which she promoted women’s writing, these salons also served as a means of collaboration with other artists and writers of the day. She believed that American, British and French writers should know one another and translate each other’s works and with that in view she served as literary hostess to famous talents including Colette, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Paul Valéry, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Proust and Sinclair Lewis.

Her wealth and social status as an intellectual afforded her many privileges, as did her unusual self-assuredness in her own rights to love and write publicly about the women she loved and spent time with. Despite this, Barney lived during a time when homosexuality was not widely accepted and faced discrimination from her own family as well as ridicule from both French and American society. For example, when her father, Albert Clifford Barney, discovered the lesbian themes of her first book, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes in 1900, he bought and destroyed the publisher’s remaining stock and the plates used to print the book. Until his death in 1902, Barney would publish anonymously under the pseudonym Tryphe. At the same time, her inheritance of nearly $9 million dollars would afford her the resources to publish poems, essays, and plays under her own name for the rest of her life.

This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.

Natalie Clifford Barney was born on October 31st, 1876, to Albert and Alice Barney. Her father was heir to a railroad fortune; her mother was a painter. Barney spent her childhood largely in Ohio, but was educated by a French governess, cementing her love of French culture. In 1900, Barney moved to France and published her first work, Quelques portraits-sonnets de femmes (Jay). The lesbian themes within the poetry shocked her parents and American audiences, but Barney viewed her sexuality as natural (Engelking 102). Though she had many lovers during her life, sources name Renée Vivien—who was with Barney from 1899 until her death in 1909—and Romaine Brooks—who’s on-and-off relationship with Barney began in 1915 and spanned fifty years—as the most prominent (Jay).
Barney established a salon at her home address, 20 rue Jacob, in 1909. Guests socialized and shared works of literature and art (Jay). The salon 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” (qtd. in Holmes and Tarr 66). In response to the Académie Française, a “cultural institution” which excluded women until 1980, Barney created the Académie des Femmes in 1927 (Charles). Engelking writes, “Women and books were inseparable for Barney, and she dedicated her life’s work to nurturing the connection between them” (101). The Académie des Femmes allowed Barney to support her friends critically and financially (Jay). Djuna Barnes depicted this female-dominated space in her Ladies’ Almanac, satirizing Loy in the process.
Loy returned to Paris in 1923; by then, Barney’s reputation as a salonnière had grown, and Loy, no longer a young mother, immersed herself in the Parisian literary world (Burke 330). The two became friends as Loy joined the Académie; Barney even became fond of Mina’s children, particularly Joella (Burke 362-364). The Académie included Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Barney, and Loy “enjoyed playing the role of token heterosexual” (Burke 362). Loy and Barney espoused similar views on love and monogamy. Of romance, Barney wrote, “I am more passionately committed to living without illusions than to abandoning myself to them—even when they make me happy” (qtd. in “Part Four”). This quote calls to mind the “illusions” Loy discusses in her “Feminist Manifesto” and typifies the cynical view Barney and Loy shared (Loy 154). The two remained friends after Loy left Paris in 1936; Barney visited New York in 1939 and bought Loy a refrigerator when she saw that Loy was too poor to afford one (Burke 389).
Barney’s salon continued to be an epicenter of creation and criticism until her death in 1972, by which time she was ninety-six and mostly uninvolved. Barney “appears as a character in half a dozen works of fiction, and her name turns up in scores of memoirs,” including works by Truman Capote, Barnes, and Ernest Hemingway (Wickes 85). She leaves behind a legacy in her works, in friendships with other artists, and through the support she provided to her friends.