Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) was a playwright, poet, prose writer, and novelist. She was born into a wealthy family and was an intelligent and rebellious child that was always interested in art and writing. The inheritance she received after her father’s death, allowed her to catapult her independent endeavors. She met Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, her first romantic partner, in 1893 as a teenager in Maine. Barney eventually moved Paris, where she built a small Temple of Friendship in her backyard and lived openly as a lesbian. Her writing supported feminism and pacifism and opposed monogamy, as exemplified in her Pensees d’une Amazone. She was nicknamed “The Amazon” by the poet Remy de Gourmont after she rode a horse astride, rather than sidesaddle, something that was not customary among women.

She had many overlapping relationships, yet remained continuously involved with the painter Romaine Brooks for fifty years. She initially held gatherings at her home in Neuilly but moved because apparently her landlord did not accept her outdoor performances. The following sixty years Barney held a weekly salon held at 20 Rue Jacob in Paris’ Latin Quarter, called “Fridays”, bringing together a large number of influential artists, writers, and patrons such as Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Isadora Duncan, and Peggy Guggenheim, as well as Auguste Rodin, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to socialize and discuss literature, art, music, and their sentiments against the war. She was a natural hostess, no matter if it was a large celebration of hundreds, or an intimate dinner. She also held musical concerts, plays, dance performances, and literary readings. Barney was known to be a facilitator that bridged the Parisian community and ex-pats that ended up in Paris after WWI. The salon was described as “a place where lesbian assignations and appointments with academics coexisted in a kind of cheerful, cross-pollinating, cognitive dissonance.” In 1927 Barney founded the Académie des Femmes (Women’s Academy) to honor and promote women writers, including Djuna Barnes, Colette, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Renée Vivien, and Anna Wickham, many of whom were her love conquests. One of the reasons she did this was as a response to L’Academie Francaise, which only admitted men.


SOURCES
http://kaykeys.net/passions/nataliebarney/20ruejacob.html
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/place_settings/natalie_barney
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173396?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/2012/05/natalie-barney-american-amazon.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalie_Clifford_Barney#Salon