Natalie Barney

Natalie Barney ran a literary salon in Paris for sixty years, lived openly as a lesbian from the 1890s, and refused on principle to be discreet about it. She was a railway-carriage heiress from Ohio, educated partly in France, and her father died in 1902 leaving her financially independent at twenty-five, which is the fact that made the rest possible. Her first book of poems, published in French in 1900, was openly addressed to women; her father bought up and destroyed what copies he could. From 1909 she held a salon every Friday at 20 rue Jacob, in a garden with a small Doric temple to friendship, and it ran until 1968 - Gertrude Stein, Colette, Rilke, Proust, Joyce, Pound, Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes and Radclyffe Hall all passed through. She founded an Academy of Women in 1927 in response to the Academie francaise, which admitted none. Her relationships were numerous, simultaneous and conducted without apology - Renee Vivien, Romaine Brooks for fifty years, Liane de Pougy, Elisabeth de Gramont - and she is the model for characters in at least half a dozen novels, including Barnes's Ladies Almanack, which satirises her salon affectionately, and Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Her politics were the unattractive part: she stayed in Italy through the war and expressed sympathy for fascism and antisemitic views that her friends and biographers have not explained away. She died in Paris at ninety-five. She wrote in French rather than English for most of her life and published poems, plays and epigrams. Romaine Brooks left her after fifty years over another relationship. The temple to friendship still stands in the courtyard at rue Jacob.

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