Portrait Of A Seductress
The World of Natalie Barney
Jean Chalon
These memoirs of Natalie Barney, by a Frenchman who knew her during the last ten years of her life, have already won two awards in France: the Cazes and Sevigne prizes in 1976. They are actually authorized memoirs, since Ms. Barney consented to be interviewed by M. Chalon on a regular basis during that period, with the understanding that the biography would be published posthumously; indeed, she left to the author certain letters and other documents hitherto unavailable. Even before her death in 1972 at the age of ninety-six, Natalie Barney had become a figure of legend who retained throughout her life the heady quality of childhood and abolished the frontiers which separate the various ages of mankind. Bom in Dayton, Ohio, in 1876, she had lived most of her life in Paris, had known almost all of the most famous artists and writers who had passed across the Parisian scene since the 1890s, had herself had a fairly prolific literary output and a series of love affairs responsible for her being known as The Amazon. A women’s libber before the women’s liberation movement existed, she had never made a secret of her preference for her own sex, insisting only that her loves be talented, beautiful, and loyal. She not only knew writers but inspired them: Flossie in Claudine by Colette and Valerie Seymour in Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness were among the characters based on The Amazon. Natalie Barney inherited wealth, which enabled her to live always in comfort. She had beauty and talent. At the age of thirty-three she established a famous salon on the Left Bank of Paris and for sixty years entertained there the cultural elite of the United States and France. During the First World War she refused to take refuge in the United States; she spent the years of the Second World War in Florence, frequently visiting Bernard Berenson. Throughout her life she seemed magically shielded from violence, as she was from hardship or poverty.
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Details
| ISBN | 9780517532645 |
| Genre | Autobiography/Biography |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Publication Date | 1979 |
| Publisher | Crown Publishers |
| Format | Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 248 |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Subject | Authors, French – Biography; Lesbians – Biography |
| BookID | 10019 |
