Wild Girls by Diana Souhami

Wild Girls

Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks

Diana Souhami

——From Publishers Weekly

Though poet Natalie Barney and artist Romaine Brooks rubbed (usually more than) elbows with the artistic elites of Bohemian Paris, neither achieved fame nor acclaim. So it is that Souhami (Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter) focuses on their relationships with one another and their many lovers, producing a book that reads more like a lesbian soap opera than a biography. The author describes people each of the two American women encountered, but concentrates less on their interactions with one another than on Barney’s affairs with, among many others, Liane de Pougy, Renee Vivien and Lily de Gramont. Barney ‘liked lots of sex, lavish display and theatricality, and wanted not to bind love to rules, particularly to the rule of exclusivity,’ Souhami explains. ‘She divided her amours into liaisons, demi-liaisons, and adventures, and called her nature fidele/infidele.’ By the time the discussion turns to Barney and Brooks-well past the book’s halfway point-readers have been inundated with so many of Barney’s flings that it is difficult to keep things straight. Souhami writes in short, declarative sentences (‘Alice was seventeen. Her bereaved mother took her on a grand tour of Europe. Alice sketched impressions of Paris, Milan and Rome.’), a style at odds with her libertine subjects that gives the impression she shortchanged texture and detail in favor of creating a tally of Barney’s multitudinous rendezvous. Photos.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

‘Diana Souhami describes the whole complex relationship well, particularly the poignancy of the final years in the lives of her two Wild Girls… Pages are crammed with descriptions of exotic characters, their extravagances and eccentricities, the lillies, the pearls, the velvet-lined rooms… ‘ — SELINA HASTINGS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ‘Far more intriguing is something that lies outside this story altogether. At the start of each chapter is placed a short passage in itallics, never more than a paragraph or two. Here the author seems to be narrating some of her personal lesbian experiences… These are fascinating and I sincerely hope Ms Souhami will expand them and produce her own memoir of life as a wild girl.’ — SELINA HASTINGS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ‘Diana Souhami’s cunning insertion of occasional vignettes from her own, rather less opulent existence as a modern gay woman enhances our awareness that this book is as much a tribute to lesbian fulfilment as a straightforward chronicle of its subjects’ lives. Her skill, not just in garnering detail, but in finding the perfect place for, is unrivalled… ‘ — Jonathan Keates LITERARY REVIEW ‘Natalie’s salon and Romaine’s paintings may be no more than cultural footnotes, but their love, in all its tortured resistless grandeur, deserves a kind of immortality.’ — Jonathan Keates LITERARY REVIEW ‘Diana Souhami, in writing about a book about them and the significant others in each of their lives has produced a series of miniatures that add up to a group portrait of a singular society that flourished in Paris (and as Souhami points out, would have been impossible anywhere else) during the first third of the 20th century… an exceptionally witty and original biographer.’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘Diana Souhami tells the story of those years with her usual wit and detail… what Souhami makes clear is that we are not only talking about sexual difference but about a completely different way of living.’ — JEANETTE WINTERSON THE TIMES ‘Wild Girls is a wonderful evocation of an era and of a relationship frightening in both its intensity and its bleakness. It is interspersed with tales of Souhami’s own life in London bars or cafes… This gives fuel to the contention that all biography is covert autobiography: we seize and dwell on those elements of our subject’s life that illuminate our own.’ — JAD ADAMS GUARDIAN –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Check for it on:

• Amazon
• Goodreads
• Google Books

Details