Renee Vivien

Renee Vivien wrote openly lesbian poetry in French, translated Sappho, and starved herself to death at thirty-two. She was born Pauline Tarn in London to a British father and an American mother, was raised partly in Paris, and inherited enough at twenty-one to escape a family that had tried to have her declared insane to control the money. She took a French name and wrote in French, which is unusual, and published a dozen volumes between 1901 and her death. The verse is Symbolist, heavily scented, obsessed with death and with Sappho, and it is the first substantial body of poetry in French to address women as a woman without disguising the pronouns - earlier writers changed the genders and she did not. She learned Greek in order to translate Sappho properly and published the translations with her own poems filling the gaps in the fragments. Her affair with Natalie Barney was the great disaster of her life; Barney was constitutionally unfaithful, Vivien was not, and the two of them went to Lesbos in 1904 to found a school of poetry and gave it up. She then attached herself to a wealthy baroness who kept her hidden. She drank, took chloral, stopped eating, attempted suicide with laudanum in 1908, and died the following year of complications of anorexia and alcohol. Her reputation was recovered by feminist scholars from the 1970s. She left instructions for a Catholic funeral, having converted shortly before her death. Her grave at Passy is still visited and left with flowers and letters. Colette wrote a memoir of her that is one of the main sources on her last years, and is not entirely reliable.

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