- Born
- 31 October 1876Dayton, Ohio, USA
- Died
- 2 February 1972Paris, France · aged 95
Natalie Clifford Barney
For sixty years her Paris salon was a meeting place for writers – and the centre of lesbian life in the city.
Natalie Clifford Barney grew up in a very wealthy family in Ohio and Washington and was educated partly in France. She knew early that she loved women, and never hid it. From 1902 she lived in Paris, where her inheritance allowed her to live as she pleased.
In 1909 she moved to 20 rue Jacob, where she held her famous Friday salon for over sixty years. Writers such as Colette, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, André Gide, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ezra Pound came to her house. In the garden stood a small Doric “Temple of Friendship”. She founded an “Academy of Women” to promote women writers.
Barney had many lovers, among them the courtesan Liane de Pougy, who wrote a novel about their affair, and the poet Renée Vivien. Her longest relationship, lasting some fifty years, was with the American painter Romaine Brooks. Barney herself wrote poems, plays and above all witty epigrams, and appears in many novels of the time, among them Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness”.
During the Second World War she lived in Italy and made statements in sympathy with fascism that have tarnished her legacy. She died in Paris in 1972, aged 95.