Wild Girls

Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312366605
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Wild Girls is the critically acclaimed true story of two wealthy American heiresses---one an artist, the other a writer---whose stormy, passionate love affair captivated Paris’s salon set between the wars. Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks were rich, American, eccentric, and grandly lesbian. They met in Paris in 1915, and their relationship lasted more than fifty years, despite infidelity, separation, and temperamental differences. Romaine Brooks, a painter, was the product of an unhappy childhood and trusted no one but Natalie. Natalie Barney was passionate about life, sex, and love. Her Friday afternoon salons, attended by Gertrude Stein, and Colette and Edith Sitwell, were a magnet for social introductions and cultural innovations. Drawing from letters, papers, and paintings, Diana Souhami, the award-winning author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, re-creates the lives and loves of this pair of dazzling and wild women. “Epic romance . . . smartly sex-positive and so good-naturedly shocking.” ---The New York Times Book Review “Real tenderness and pathos . . . not only entertaining but affecting reading.” ---The Washington Post “Their friends were the most bohemian, their parties the most risqué, their tortured love affair the most notorious in Europe. Diana Souhami tells a remarkable tale.” ---The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

Romaine Brooks

Author: Cassandra L. Langer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780299298630
Category : Expatriate artists
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description

No Modernism Without Lesbians

Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786694859
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
A Sunday Times Book of the Year Winner of the Polari Prize 'A book about love, identity, acceptance and the freedom to write, paint, compose and wear corduroy breeches with gaiters. To swear, kiss, publish and be damned. It is vastly entertaining and often moving... There isn't a page without an entertaining vignette' The Times. The extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, Between the Wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves their stories into those of the four central women to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-War Paris. 'One of the best books I've read this year.' James Bridle

Amazons in the Drawing Room

Author: Whitney Chadwick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520225678
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
Coinciding with a traveling exhibition opening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in June, this volume presents a comprehensive and definitive analysis of the life and art of Romaine Brooks, reproducing for the first time in color 34 of the 40 nudes and portraits she painted. Includes an essay by Joe Lucchesi.

Women Lovers, Or The Third Woman

Author: Natalie Clifford Barney
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299306909
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
This long-lost novel recounts a passionate triangle of love and loss among three of the most daring women of belle époque Paris. In this barely disguised roman à clef, the legendary American heiress, writer, and arts patron Natalie Clifford Barney, the dashing Italian baroness Mimi Franchetti, and the beautiful French courtesan Liane de Pougy share erotic liaisons that break all taboos and end in devastation as one unexpectedly becomes the “third woman.” Never before published in English, and only recently published in French, this modernist, experimental work has been brought to light by Chelsea Ray’s research and translation.

Between Me and Life

Author: Meryle Secrest
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Sister Wendy Beckett's brilliant insight and quirky delivery have made her both a respected art critic and a beloved personality. Now she focuses her attention on American art in this volume that contains more than 50 high-quality, large-scale reproductions. Full color.

Almost Famous Women

Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476786569
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Nearly every story in this collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity, from Lord Byron's illegitimate daughter, Allegra, to Oscar Wilde's troubled niece, Dolly.

Strange Impressions

Author: Romaine Brooks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1644230828
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 93

Book Description
Selections from Romaine Brooks’s unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories expose the psyche and practice of this underrecognized queer, female artist. Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects—often women—Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted. Her frank approach to her complicated relationship with her mother, faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender is complemented by a keen wit that echoes the gray tones of her work. Though her paintings are held in major collections, Brooks’s influence in modernist circles of the early twentieth century is largely underexplored. This new publication, guided by Brooks’s own impressionistic musings, bridges an important gap between the art and the artist. An introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler explores Brooks’s role as an artist in the early twentieth century through the lens of gender and sexuality.

The Well of Loneliness

Author: Radclyffe Hall
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473374081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
This early work by Radclyffe Hall was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'The Well of Loneliness' is a novel that follows an upper-class Englishwoman who falls in love with another woman while serving as an ambulance driver in World War I. Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly. Hall is a key figure in lesbian literature for her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). This is her only work with overt lesbian themes and tells the story of the life of a masculine lesbian named Stephen Gordon.

The One Who Is Legion

Author: Natalie Clifford Barney
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781645251460
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"For years I have been haunted by the idea that I should orchestrate those inner voices which sometimes speak to us in unison, and so compose a novel, not so much with the people about us, as with those within ourselves, for have we not several selves and cannot a story arise from their conflicts and harmonies?" Thus wrote Natalie Clifford Barney in her author's note to The One Who Is Legion, a novel which she published privately in London in 1930 in an edition of only 560 copies. The book, which received scant notice at the time of its publication and has since been all but forgotten, is at once an occult work of genius and an early example of androgynous literature. Here brought forth in a new edition that should secure its place as one of the great classics of modernism, this highly experimental tour de force, in which Barney reinterprets the stream of consciousness techniques James Joyce had used in Ulysses in her own highly original style, is a strange story of possession and fourth-dimensional materialism-and is, in fact, a glorious labyrinth of visions and emotions.