Queer History 116: Natalie Clifford Barney

How an American heiress built a lesbian literary empire in the heart of French culture while telling society to go fuck itself

In a century when most queer women lived lives of quiet desperation—married to men they couldn't love, hiding their desires in coded letters and secret meetings—Natalie Clifford Barney created a goddamn revolution in plain sight. This wasn't some closeted, tortured artist writing veiled poems about forbidden love from the safety of heterosexual marriage. This was a woman who, in fucking 1900, declared: "I am a lesbian. One need not hide beneath a bushel a light that has been lighted by God." And then spent the next SEVENTY YEARS proving it, building the most influential literary salon in Paris while openly loving women, writing explicitly about lesbian sexuality, and creating a space where queer female artists could thrive beyond the suffocating constraints of patriarchal society.

Born to obscene wealth in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876, Barney could have lived a life of mindless privilege—hosting tea parties, marrying well, and dying without leaving a mark on the world. Instead, she used her fortune to create what she called her "Académie des Femmes" (Academy of Women), a direct counter to the all-male French Academy, and transformed her garden pavilion at 20 Rue Jacob in Paris into the epicenter of modernist literature and queer female culture for over six decades. While her male contemporaries like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound have been endlessly celebrated, Barney's revolutionary contributions have been systematically erased—because history has always been more comfortable with gay men than with a woman who openly loved other women and told society's rules to go straight to hell.

"I Write to Free Myself and to Free Others": The Radical Writer

Long before she established her famous salon, Barney was already smashing taboos through her writing. Her first collection of poems, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes ("Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women"), published in 1900, contained explicit love poems to women—including the actress Renée Vivien, who would become one of her most significant relationships. This wasn't euphemistic, ambiguous poetry that could be interpreted as "close friendship." These were unapologetically erotic celebrations of female beauty and desire.

When her mother discovered the nature of these poems and tried to buy up all the copies to prevent scandal, Barney just fucking laughed and kept writing. Her subsequent books—including Je me souviens ("I Remember"), Pensées d'une Amazone ("Thoughts of an Amazon"), and Nouvelles Pensées de l'Amazone ("New Thoughts of the Amazon")—continued to explore lesbian identity, love between women, and feminist philosophy with a directness that was utterly unprecedented for women writers of her era.

"Most women were publishing their queer content anonymously or under male pseudonyms," explains literary historian Shari Benstock. "Barney put her goddamn name on everything and dared society to come at her."

Her writing style was aphoristic, dense, and challenging—not the flowery, "feminine" writing expected of women. In Pensées d'une Amazone, she wrote: "Heterosexuality is a recent social custom, a bit boring, but widespread." In another work, she declared: "Women who love women are unique because they have escaped masculine domination."

While her literary output wasn't as voluminous as some of her contemporaries, her willingness to write openly about lesbian identity and female sexual autonomy in an era when such topics were virtually unpublishable made her work revolutionary. She refused to use euphemisms or coding, and she rejected the tragic narratives that dominated the few existing lesbian texts of her time.

"Why must we always end badly?" she wrote, challenging the literary convention that queer characters must die or suffer for their "sins." "I refuse to participate in this conspiracy against happiness."

"My Queendom for a Stage": Creating the Ultimate Literary Salon

The true fucking masterpiece of Barney's life wasn't a book or a play—it was her salon. For over sixty years, from 1909 until near her death in 1972, she hosted gatherings that brought together the most brilliant minds in literature, art, music, and philosophy. On Friday evenings, the garden and pavilion at 20 Rue Jacob became the place where modernism itself was being forged, where literary reputations were made and destroyed, and where women—especially queer women—could find community and recognition typically denied them elsewhere.

"The salon wasn't just a social event—it was a deliberate, strategic creation of alternative cultural space," argues historian Tirza True Latimer. "Barney understood that women needed their own institutions, their own networks of support and promotion."

The guest list reads like a who's who of 20th-century culture: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Radclyffe Hall, Colette, Marcel Proust, Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Truman Capote, and countless others passed through her doors. Unlike other salons, which often segregated their guests by status or fame, Barney deliberately mixed established figures with unknown talents, creating a democratic space where ideas could flourish.

"It wasn't just about who was there—it was about what happened when they were there together," notes biographer Diana Souhami. "Barney created collisions between people who would never otherwise have met, and those collisions changed literature forever."

The physical space itself was designed for theatrical effect. The garden featured a small Greek-inspired temple of Friendship where Barney sometimes staged her plays. Inside, the walls were covered with portraits of the women Barney had loved—a radical declaration of lesbian life in an era when such relationships were supposed to remain hidden. Far from the stuffiness of traditional literary gatherings, Barney's events featured performances, music, elaborate costumes, and an atmosphere of intellectual freedom mixed with sensual pleasure.

"Entering Barney's salon was like stepping into another fucking world," one attendee recalled. "A world where women could speak their minds without interruption, where lesbian relationships were celebrated rather than whispered about, where the usual social hierarchies were temporarily suspended."

"My Life Has Been More Exalted Than My Work": The Legendary Lover

If Barney's literary career and salon were revolutionary, her love life was absolutely mythic. Throughout her long life, she engaged in relationships with some of the most fascinating women of her era, conducted passionate affairs, managed multiple ongoing relationships simultaneously, and refused to apologize for any of it.

Her first significant relationship was with Renée Vivien (born Pauline Tarn), a British poet who shared Barney's passion for Sappho and Greek culture. Their intense connection lasted from 1899 to 1901 and inspired some of Vivien's most beautiful poetry. But Barney's refusal to be monogamous eventually drove the more possessive Vivien away—though they remained connected until Vivien's tragic early death in 1909 at just 32.

The most enduring relationship of Barney's life was with the American painter Romaine Brooks, which lasted from 1915 until Brooks' death in 1970. Their bond survived despite Brooks' reclusiveness and Barney's ongoing affairs with other women—a testament to Barney's ability to create relationship structures that defied conventional expectations.

Other significant lovers included the courtesan Liane de Pougy, who fictionalized their affair in her novel Idylle Saphique; the dancer Armen Ohanian; the writer Lucie Delarue-Mardrus; and Elisabeth de Gramont, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre, with whom Barney created a "marriage contract" that stated: "No more fidelity, no more possession... but that which comes from the pleasure of being united."

"Barney wasn't just having relationships—she was reinventing what relationships between women could be," explains queer historian Lillian Faderman. "She was creating polyamorous, non-possessive, honest connections decades before those concepts had names."

Perhaps most remarkable was her relationship with the famous courtesan Liane de Pougy. After their initial affair, Barney remained friends with Pougy even after the latter married a prince. When Pougy adopted a son, Barney became his godmother. This ability to transform sexual relationships into lasting friendships and chosen family structures was revolutionary in an era when former lovers typically became bitter enemies or awkward strangers.

"I have sought nothing but freedom in my life," Barney wrote, "freedom in love, freedom from conventional restraints, and above all, the freedom to be myself wholly and completely."

"A Woman Is a River": The Hardships Behind the Glamour

Behind the glamorous facade of wealth, beauty, and artistic freedom, Barney faced significant challenges and painful losses that aren't always captured in the mythic narratives about her life. Her radical openness about her sexuality came at a cost, even with her financial privileges.

When her first poetry collection was published with illustrations by her lover at the time, her father was so horrified by the scandal that he threatened to cut off her inheritance. Though he died before following through on this threat, the rejection by her family was painful. Her mother's attempts to destroy all copies of her early work represented another betrayal from those who should have supported her talent.

"Money bought Barney freedom, but it couldn't protect her from heartbreak," notes biographer Suzanne Rodriguez. "And she experienced devastating losses throughout her life."

The suicide of her beloved Dolly Wilde (Oscar Wilde's niece), who struggled with addiction, devastated Barney. The early death of Renée Vivien, who literally drank and starved herself to death after their breakup, haunted her for decades. During both World Wars, Barney was forced to flee Paris—during WWI to Italy and during WWII to a villa in Florence—disrupting her salon and separating her from her community.

Perhaps most painful was watching as many of her contemporaries achieved the literary recognition that often eluded her. Despite her significant contributions to modernist literature and her role in supporting countless writers who would become famous, Barney's own work was frequently dismissed as minor or overlooked entirely.

"The literary establishment could handle a lesbian writer if she was sufficiently tragic, like Radclyffe Hall, or if she wrote in coded language, like many did," explains literary scholar Karla Jay. "But they didn't know what the fuck to do with a woman who was explicitly, joyfully queer and refused to apologize for it."

As she aged, Barney also faced the universal challenge of watching her circle of friends and lovers diminish through death. By the time she reached her nineties, most of her contemporaries had passed away, leaving her increasingly isolated despite her legendary status.

"There is a special kind of loneliness in outliving your generation," she wrote in her later years. "I have become a living archive of ghosts."

"Living is the Rarest Thing in the World": Creating Art Through Life

What truly set Barney apart from her literary contemporaries was her understanding that creating a life could be as significant an artistic act as writing a novel or composing a symphony. While she produced important written work, her greatest creation was her existence itself—the way she crafted her relationships, her salon, her physical spaces, and her public persona into a unified aesthetic vision.

"I wanted my life itself to be a poem," she once wrote. And indeed, she approached her day-to-day existence with the same attention to beauty, meaning, and symbolic resonance that a poet brings to language.

This perspective allowed her to recognize and nurture talent in others even when traditional literary gatekeepers missed it. She was among the first to recognize the genius of writers like Djuna Barnes, whose masterpiece "Nightwood" might never have found publication without Barney's support and connections.

"For women, especially queer women, traditional paths to literary recognition were largely closed," notes scholar Shari Benstock. "Barney created alternative routes to audience and influence."

Her theatrical productions in her garden—often adaptations of Sappho's poetry or reimaginings of Greek myths with explicitly lesbian themes—blurred the line between art and life, between social gathering and performance. These weren't just amateur theatricals; they were deliberate attempts to create new mythologies centered on female power and desire.

"She understood that queer people needed their own stories, their own heroes, their own creation myths," explains cultural historian Tirza True Latimer. "So she literally staged them in her garden."

Perhaps most radically, Barney rejected the notion that suffering was necessary for great art. While many of her contemporaries embraced the trope of the tormented artist, Barney insisted that pleasure, joy, and beauty were equally valid foundations for creativity.

"Why do we glorify pain in art while dismissing pleasure as frivolous?" she wrote. "This is nothing but patriarchal thinking disguised as aesthetic principle."

"I Am My Own Heroine": Forging Identity Against All Odds

The sheer fucking audacity of Barney's self-creation can't be overstated. In an era when women were still fighting for basic rights like voting, when lesbian existence was classified as mental illness, when female authors were expected to be self-effacing and apologetic, Barney declared herself an "Amazon" and created her identity entirely on her own terms.

Her presentation was deliberately androgynous but never masculine. She rejected both the hyper-femininity expected of women in her social class and the butch aesthetic that many lesbians of her era adopted. With her flowing clothes, distinctive bob haircut, and elegant riding habits, she developed a personal style that was uniquely her own—neither attempting to imitate men nor conforming to conventional femininity.

"I never wanted to be a man," she wrote, challenging the prevalent medical view of lesbianism as "sexual inversion" or women wanting to be men. "I wanted to love women as myself, as a woman who loves the beauty and spirit of other women."

This insistence on defining herself outside existing categories extended to her national identity as well. Though American by birth, she lived most of her life in France and wrote primarily in French—yet maintained her American passport and certain American sensibilities. She was, in essence, creating a transnational identity decades before such concepts became common.

"Barney wasn't French or American—she was creating her own fucking country," suggests literary scholar Karla Jay. "A country where women ruled, where art was the highest value, where love wasn't constrained by gender or convention."

Her wealth allowed her to establish physical territories—her home on Rue Jacob, her country house in Dammarie-lès-Lys—where her values could temporarily become the law of the land. Within these spaces, women could love each other openly, female artists could receive the recognition denied them elsewhere, and alternative family structures could flourish.

"What Barney understood before most of her contemporaries," argues historian Lillian Faderman, "was that marginalized people need to create their own institutions, their own spaces, their own cultures. She was practicing what we now call cultural separatism nearly a century before it became a feminist strategy."

"Against the Forgetting": The Legacy and Erasure

Despite her extraordinary contributions to literature, feminism, and queer culture, Barney has been systematically erased from mainstream cultural history. While her male contemporaries and even many of the women she supported have been canonized, Barney remains largely unknown outside academic circles and lesbian history enthusiasts.

This erasure began even during her lifetime. When Janet Flanner wrote her famous "Letter from Paris" columns for The New Yorker, she mentioned seemingly every literary figure in the city—except Barney, whose salon she regularly attended. Male modernists who benefited from Barney's patronage and connections rarely acknowledged her influence in their memoirs or letters.

"The silence around Barney wasn't accidental," argues literary historian Shari Benstock. "It was a deliberate fucking erasure of a woman who refused to make her queerness palatable to straight society."

Even in death, this erasure continued. When she passed away in 1972 at the age of 95, her obituaries frequently downplayed or completely ignored her sexuality, her feminist activism, and her literary innovations. She was often reduced to a wealthy American expatriate who "knew everybody" rather than recognized as a groundbreaking writer and cultural force in her own right.

"History has been more comfortable with gay men than with lesbians," notes historian George Chauncey. "And within lesbian history, we've been more comfortable with tragic figures like Radclyffe Hall than with someone like Barney who lived joyfully and unapologetically."

This erasure makes her surviving legacy all the more precious. Her home at 20 Rue Jacob still stands in Paris, though it is privately owned and not open to the public. Her papers, preserved at the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet in Paris, continue to provide scholars with insights into her life and work. And her books, though long out of print, are slowly being rediscovered, translated, and republished for new generations.

"Barney fought against the forgetting," writes biographer Diana Souhami. "She preserved letters, maintained friendships across decades, created physical spaces that would outlast her. She knew that lesbian history was constantly being erased, and she was determined that her story—and the stories of the women she loved—would survive."

"I Will Be Reborn": Why Barney Matters Now

In an era when LGBTQ+ rights are under renewed attack, when book bans targeting queer content are spreading across America, when transgender people are facing legislative assault, the example of Natalie Barney offers both inspiration and practical strategies for resistance.

Barney understood that queer survival requires both public defiance and the creation of protected spaces. Her dual approach—being openly lesbian in her writing and public life while also establishing physical territories where queer people could gather safely—provides a template for contemporary activism that balances visibility with community building.

Her insistence on joy, pleasure, and beauty as forms of resistance challenges the narrative that queer existence must be defined by trauma and struggle. "We have been taught that suffering is noble," she wrote. "This is perhaps the most insidious lie we must unlearn."

Perhaps most importantly, Barney's life demonstrates the power of creating alternative institutions when mainstream ones exclude you. Her "Académie des Femmes" wasn't just a clever name—it was a deliberate attempt to create parallel structures of recognition, support, and promotion for women writers at a time when the official French Academy remained exclusively male.

"What would it mean for queer communities today to create our own academies, our own salons, our own systems of recognition?" asks cultural historian Tirza True Latimer. "Barney shows us it's possible to build cultural power from the margins."

In her final years, when asked if she feared death, Barney reportedly smiled and said, "I have lived so many lives already. I will simply be reborn." As new generations discover her work and her example, this prophecy continues to fulfill itself. Natalie Clifford Barney—Amazon, writer, lover, salon-keeper, and revolutionary—is being reborn, again and again, in everyone who refuses to diminish themselves to satisfy society's expectations.

In her own words, written when she was in her seventies but still with decades of life ahead: "There are more and more of us being born every day."

References

1. Wickes, G. (1976). The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney.

2. Souhami, D. (2004). Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks.

3. Rodriguez, S. (2002). Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris.

4. Benstock, S. (1986). Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940.

5. Jay, K. (1988). The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien.

6. Barney, N. C. (1992). A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (A. Livia, Trans.).

7. Cleyrergue, S. (2009). Natalie Clifford Barney, Romaine Brooks: Un Amour Fait de Lumière et d'Ombre.

8. Latimer, T. T. (2005). Women Together/Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris.

9. Faderman, L. (1991). Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America.

10. Weiss, A. (1995). Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank.