My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one

Women Lovers, or the Third Lover, by Natalie Barney

The titular quote is perhaps Natalie Barney’s most famous, and it comes from a letter. Barney was a writer of novels, but she’s mostly famous for her biography, for her weekly salon, and for being a sort of seducer of women. Both her life and her work were far ahead of their time. She knew she was a lesbian by the time she was twelve years old, which would have been…1888. She was determined to unashamedly and openly as a lesbian. She claimed that when a man told her she could not “make a career of loving women”, she was puzzled as to why she could not. She’d been haphazardly educated, partially at a French boarding school that Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia was based on, which likely affirmed her lesbianism, this was a contradiction. If that attitude seemed sheltered and naive, that’s because Barney likely was. Unlike most women of the era (or of any era), she was born into wealth and high society, which would have allowed for her greater freedom and choice than most women of her era. She was American, but moved to France (where the Napoleonic code had historically allowed for greater freedom for queerness than in the US). when she was in her early twenties. Still, Barney’s father was rather domineering. He refused her access to her trust fund until she was married. When Barney published a book of openly lesbian poetry, her father not only purchased all copies of the book, but also had the plates destroyed. He died when Barney was twenty-six, and she gained access to her trust; the equivalent of over $100 million in today’s dollars. It freed her financially, but her father’s death also freed of the rich-heiress’s Edwardian obligation to “marry well”. She spoke to the openness of her lesbianism allowed her to keep young men at bay.

Her claim to fame was her salon, which she started with the intent to highlight women’s intellectual leanings, and support female writers and poets. Luminaries such as Nobel laureates Rabindranath Tagore and André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Tamara De Lempicka, and Mata Hari attended. James Joyce and her lover (and my favorite) Romaine Brooks attended but didn’t care as much for the salon (well, Romaine Brooks was introverted compared to Natalie Barney). Radclyffe Hall read the then-recently-banned The Well of Loneliness at a salon, but Barney and her lover Brooks seemed to often poke fun of Hall, and disagreed with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s lesbian monogamous “marriage”, with Stein acting somewhat like the “husband” and Toklas as more as the “wife”. Barney was famously non-monogamous. She has many lovers, and her reputation for picking up women in Parisian bathrooms and park benches is the stuff of legend. Her first demi-liaison with a teenager was when they were approximately seventeen, she picked up a woman on a park bench and took her home when she was in her eighties (they became lovers for a while).

Her writing is as ahead of its time as her life. Some of Barney’s work, such as Women Lovers, or the Third Woman, is in the form of a pensée, sometimes translated to “aphorism”. A pensée draws upon the French literary tradition, and it’s more of thought and reflection that uses fine rhetoric and makes a comment on humanity. Her writing is also minimalist and very modernist. Unlike, say Virginia Woolf, such openly, unapologetically lesbian writing wouldn’t have been so popular in the mid-1920s, when Women Lovers, or the Third Women was written. Even today, that Barney wrote having many lovers simultaneously would be scandalous, and that controversy that might still overshadow her ability and merit as a writer.

Women Lovers, or the Third Women is a very experimental, barely-disguised snapshot of one of Barney’s affairs. The book starts off with each of the three partners in the affair, insightful, delightful little snapshots. “N” is Natalie, and she’s bluntly honest about herself. In the beginning, Natalie is in the middle of a passionate affair with Mimi Franchetti, “M”. Into this appears “L”, Barney’s sporadic lover, Liane de Pougy¹, who was once one of France’s most famous courtesans. The three of them become lovers, sometimes, and there are scenes in the book of the three of them making love with each other. Sex scenes are seldom well-written; too often they’re too obvious, ugly, or too much like a camera cutting away when the action begins. Barney acknowledges the pleasure she takes from sex and women’s bodies, the scenes describing sex are delicate and beautiful; I’ve included one at the end of this passage. She offhandedly mentions that her “dearest friend” (Romaine Brooks) is blowing her off because Brooks is having a passionate affair with someone, one that involves “emotions”, which is a rarity for Brooks². The “woman [Barney] loved best” (Élisabeth de Gramont) is a mere footnote. That means that at this time, when Barney is about fifty years old, she has four lovers. She advocates for openness in relationships, that being part of a couple could be stifling and bourgeois. Barney also writes of her increasing insecurity and jealousy in this situation, and slowly, how she realized that “L” and “M” were becoming closer and “N” became the third women in the relationship. The last chapter of this book is one of the best last chapters of a book I’ve read: it’s a conversation about the nature and difficulties of love, between Natalie Barney and the “newly miserable woman”, Djuna Barnes. Even in that single conversation, Barnes’ brilliance shines, and she’s more memorable than the often tiresome “L” and “M”. It’s worth reading for that chapter alone, but the book is charming and worth reading nonetheless.

This book is only 160 pages, but there is an introduction by Melanie C. Hawthorne that explores Barney’s writing in the context of her era, of women modernist writers, and philosophies of gender that start with ancient Greek philosophy. I sometimes skip introductions because so many give away entire plots, but this one doesn’t, and it also adds context for the reading Barney’s book.

1. de Pougy also wrote one of the earliest post-Sappho openly lesbian novels I could find, which translates roughly to “Sapphic Idyll”, about her early affair with Barney.

2. This was interesting to me; as a huge Romaine Brooks fan that’s read everything I could find about Brooks, I was under the impression that Barney and Brooks were one another’s dearest, most loved lovers. Yet, in Barney’s own words, Brooks is a “friend” and another woman is most loved. It could be that Brooks and Barney became closer over time, this book was written a decade or so into their fifty-year-relationship. Near the end of her life, after Brooks’ death, Barney said that her dearest hope was to see Brooks again. There’s a photo floating about of a much-older Barney in her Paris home that shows a large framed photograph of Brooks behind her. Barney and Brooks also lived together in Italy during WWII (Barney was one-quarter Jewish, so remaining in Nazi-occupied Paris would have been dangerous; yet Barney was questionably pro-Fascist and perhaps anti-Semitic at times…or perhaps she wrote this in her memoirs to save herself from Nazi persecution as she was part-Jewish)