February 12, 2024 • 32 mins
Natalie Clifford Barney was an incredibly privileged woman who hobnobbed with many notable intellectual and artistic figures in history. Part one covers her upbringing, her young adult life in Paris, and her massive inheritance.
Research:
- Barney, Natalie Clifford. “POEMS & POÈMES: autres alliances.” Paris and New York. 1920. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49942/49942-h/49942-h.htm
- Conliffe, Ciaran. “Natalie Clifford Barney, Queen Of The Paris Lesbians.” HeadStuff. 9/25/2017. https://headstuff.org/culture/history/natalie-clifford-barney-queen-of-the-paris-lesbians/
- Craddock, James. “Barney, Natalie.” Encyclopedia of World Biography (Vol. 33. 2nd ed.). 2013.
- Engelking, Tama Lea. “The Literary Friendships of Natalie Clifford Barney: The Case of Lucie Delarue-Mardrus.” Women in French Studies, Volume 7, 1999, pp. 100-116. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.1999.0007
- “Natalie Clifford Barney.” Encyclopedia of World Biography Online. 2023.
- Goodman, Lanie. “Wealthy, Scandalous and Powerful.” France Today. February/March 2020.
- O’Neil, Shannon Leigh. “A Steamy Novel From ‘the Amazon.’” The Gay & Lesbian Review. March-April 2017.
- Rapazzini, Francesco. “Elisabeth de Gramont, Natalie Barney's ‘Eternal Mate.’” South Central Review , Fall, 2005, Vol. 22, No. 3, Natalie Barney and Her Circle (Fall, 2005). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40039992
- Ray, Chelsea. “Natalie Barney (1876-1972): Writer, salon hostess, and eternal friend. Interview with Jean Chalon.” Women in French Studies, Volume 30, 2022, pp. 154-169. https://doi.org/10.1353/wfs.2022.0012
- Robertson, Kieran. “Amazon, Empress, and Friend: The Life of Natalie Clifford Barney.” Ohio History Connection. https://www.ohiohistory.org/amazon-empress-and-friend-the-life-of-natalie-clifford-barney/
- Rodriguez, Suzanne. “Wild Heart: Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris.” Harper Collins. 2003.
- Washington Post. “This Was Love Indeed!” 5/7/1911. https://www.newspapers.com/image/19409771/
- Wickes, George. “A Natalie Barney Garland.” The Paris Review. Issue 61, Spring 1975. https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3870/a-natalie-barney-garland-george-wickes
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
If you listen to the listener mail segments at the
end of our episodes, you might remember that Kristen wrote
in about a Marie Lawrence exhibition at the Barnes Foundation
in Philadelphia. I did indeed manage to get down there
before it closed on January twenty first. It was absolutely
worth it, even though I had some weather related travel
(00:37):
stress and I picked up a cold that has been
lingering for nearly three weeks now. If you're like Tracy,
that's COVID, it's not COVID. Negative for COVID, including on
a molecular test, not COVID anyway, though the exhibits introductory
signage included this, Before and after the war, Lawrence sah
(01:02):
attended salons inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, held
at the Paris home of lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney,
and standing there in the museum, I was like, Okay,
I'm taking that as a message from the universe to
finally do an episode on Natalie Clifford Barney. Her name
has come up before, including in our episodes on both
(01:26):
Brie Lawrencen and Collette, who we talked about last year,
and then she's also she was connected to a bunch
of other people we have talked about in the past,
including Isidora Duncan, Edna Saint Vincent Malay and Gertrude Stein
and Alice by Toklas. And then every time her name
comes up in something that I'm researching, I'm like, we
(01:47):
gotta do an episode on her sometime, and so now
we finally are. I did not mean for this to
be a two part episode. I got to the end
of my note taking phase in what I did not
even feel like were particularly like. I didn't feel like
I was taking overly detailed notes. But I got to
the end of notes and I had a word count
(02:09):
that was already a whole episode, and I was like, oh,
I'm in trouble. So this became two parts. Today we
are going to talk about Natalie Clifford Barney's upbringing, her
young adult life in Paris, and then the death of
her father leaving her independently wealthy. And then next time
on Wednesday, we will talk about the Paris Salon that
(02:32):
she became really famous for.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Natalie Clifford Barney was born in Dayton, Ohio, on October
thirty first, eighteen seventy six. She loved that this was
her birthday. She felt like her life contained a lot
of duality, so she liked that October thirty first had
connections to both Christian and pagan observances. Later, she also
developed an affinity for astrology and numerology, and she formed
(02:56):
a club called the Scorpions after their astrological sign of
Scorpio for people with the same birthday, and one of
the other members of that club was Marie Lawrence Soon.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Natalie was the first daughter born to Albert Clifford Barney
and Alice Pike Barney, who were both from wealthy families.
Albert's father had made a fortune manufacturing railway cars, including
for the Pullman Company, and Alice's father was an entrepreneur
who ran a dry goods store and distilleries, doing well
enough that he eventually moved into investing in things like
(03:28):
property and trolley systems and opera houses. Thanks to those
opera houses, guests at the Pike home when Alice was
young included past podcast subjects Marie Taglioni and Lola Montes,
and Alice developed a deep love of music and the arts.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
The Barney family moved to Cincinnati when Natalie was still
a baby, and her younger sister, Laura was born there
in eighteen seventy nine. While Natalie was always creative and
outgoing and sociable in many ways, Laura was nearly her oppice.
She was just a lot more quiet and reserved. But
the two of them had a very tight and lifelong
bond as sisters.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
While their life at home was financially pretty comfortable, it
was not always happy. Albert and Alice's marriage was strained
pretty soon after the wedding. Alice had come to see
him as narrow minded and prejudiced. He also had a
lot of affairs over the course of the marriage, and
there's really not evidence that Alice did the same, but
(04:27):
he was deeply jealous and possessive of her.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
For example, not long after they got married, Albert found
letters that explorer and writer Henry Morton Stanley had written
to Alice. Henry and Alice had met in New York
when Alice was seventeen and Henry was thirty three, and
he eventually proposed, but Alice's mother had sent her back
to Dayton to separate the two of them. When Albert
(04:52):
found these letters, Alice insisted they were nothing to be
threatened by, but he made her burn them all while
he was watching Albert. It's jealousy of and antipathy for
Henry Morton Stanley went on for years, and it didn't
help that newspaper reporters writing about Stanley often brought up
the fact that he had once been betrothed to an
heiress who had left him and married someone else. It
(05:15):
was one of those details they liked to drop in
reporting that was not about his relationships at all, They
just throw that in there. Albert's behavior could also be
really frightening, especially when he was intoxicated. Once, after he
had a fight with Alice, he took Natalie and Laura
out of the house and boarded a train with them
and then threatens to kill all three of them by
(05:37):
throwing them off of it. He only stopped when Natalie
grabbed the emergency brake and threatens a pullet and make
a scene. When Natalie and Laura were still young children,
the family started spending their summers at seaside resorts. When
Natalie was six, she had a formative experience. While they
were in Long Beach, New York. Natalie was trying to
(05:57):
run away from a pack of boys when a tall
man came to her rescue and picked her up. That
tall man turned out to be Oscar Wilde, who was
in New York on a North American tour. Natalie later
called this her first adventure.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
This was a formative moment for her mother too. The
next day, Oscar Wilde showed up at the beach and
struck up a conversation with Alice. They were essentially strangers,
but they wound up having this really intimate discussion about
Alice's life and her marriage. Alice and Oscar were confidants
until Oscar had to go back to his tour, and
(06:33):
their conversations really highlighted for her how unhappy she was
and how her passions for art and music had been
squashed through her marriage to Albert.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Soon after, Alice convinced Albert to take a trip to
Europe under the guise of looking for a boarding school
for the girls to attend when they got a little older.
Albert was of the opinion that a European education would
be necessary for the girls to attract suitable husbands, so
he agreed to this trip. But Alice also had another
goal in mind, which was figuring out how she could
(07:06):
get herself to Europe to study painting.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
About four years later, in eighteen eighty seven, Albert's mother
died and Albert inherited enough money that the family became
really wealthy. This was wealthy enough to actually afford the
kind of lifestyle they'd been living for the last few years,
and to kick it up a notch. Not long after
the estate was settled, Albert started construction on two new homes.
(07:32):
One was the family's main residence in Washington, d c.
The other was a summer cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Although the word cottage has connotations of something small and quaint,
a lot of the so called cottages built in North
America during the Gilded Age were quite the opposite. They
were literally mansions. This Bar Harbor cottage, known as Bannyburn,
(07:57):
had twenty seven rooms, including seven bedrooms just for the servants.
This was also the year that Natalie and Laura were
sent to boarding school in France, to a school called
Le Rouche, which they had visited on that earlier trip
to Europe. Natalie was eleven at this point and her
sister was seven, and Alice convinced their father that since
(08:19):
they were so young and had never been away from
home like this before, that she should go to France
as well and rent an apartment in Paris. Although this
was really about her getting away from Albert and getting
to study painting, this transition really was hard for the girls.
When their parents had first tried to drop them off
at the school, they were both so upset that the
(08:40):
family wound up going back to Paris for a while
before trying again. Yeah, this is also like the pattern
for the rest of Alice's life was finding reasons, like
finding reasonable explanations for her to be in Europe studying
painting instead of back in the United States with her husband.
(09:00):
There was an irony in this choice of boarding school though,
as we said, in Albert's mind this education was going
to help his daughters attract suitable husbands, and Le Rouche
was a prestigious school. Its curriculum was focused on the
kinds of subjects that were considered appropriate for the future
wives of rich men, so things like languages, music, poetry,
(09:24):
deportment and drawing, but the school's founder, Maurice vest also
she thought that girls should be able to think for themselves.
By the time Natalie and Laura enrolled at the school,
she herself had moved on to start a school outside London,
where one of her students would be the famously headstrong
(09:45):
Eleanor Roosevelt. But the school was still very focused on
teaching girls to make their own decisions and to think
about things logically and rationally. This school they were sent
to in France was really not one that was going
to teach them to be obedient to their parents or
subservient to future husbands. Meanwhile, Alice Barney was making a
(10:09):
serious study of art. One of the paintings she created
during her daughter's first term at school, called Paissan Polonaise
or Polish Peasant, was accepted at the Paris Salon in
eighteen eighty nine. We will get to Natalie's life at
school after a quick sponsor break. While in school at LaRouche,
(10:37):
Natalie Clifford Barney was an excellent student in some subjects,
kind of an okay student in other ones. It seems
like it really depended on whether this interested her or not.
She had started learning French from a governess earlier in
her life, and French was the only language allowed to
be spoken at LaRouche. This put her on the path
(10:58):
to becoming a fluent speaker of both French and English,
and most of her later riding was in French. Natalie
wrote and played the violin, and she also played tennis
and croquet, and she spent as much time as she
could riding horses. Horseback riding was one of her great
loves in life. She also became increasingly free spirited and rebellious,
(11:21):
so things like refusing to wear corsets and insisting on
riding a stride on her horse instead of side saddle,
as women and girls were expected to do.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And she also realized that she was attracted to other girls.
We have talked on the show before about how for
much of the nineteenth century there was a lot of
stigma around lesbianism in adult women, but it was simultaneously
considered normal and healthy for girls to have physically affectionate
relationships and even crushes on one another. This was thought
(11:55):
of as sort of a necessary step in becoming a
good wife to a man. People only started to regard
these relationships with suspicion if girls got too old for
it or if their relationships were too intense. But by
the time she was about twelve, Natalie understood that her
attraction to girls was not just part of her childhood,
(12:15):
that it would be central to her entire life.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Although Natalie had crushes and flirtations at LaRouche, it seems
like the first time another girl returned her affections in
the same way was in Bar Harbor in eighteen ninety three.
Eva Palmer's family also summered there, and she and Natalie
had become friends a few summers before. When their relationship
(12:39):
moved from platonic to physical, Natalie was sixteen and Eva
was nineteen. Their first sexual experience together was after Eva
read a poem by Sappho at a variety show. She
read this in its original Greek, so unless they knew Greek,
the people and the audience were not really aware of
its significance. Can't imagine there were a lot of people
(13:02):
fluent in Greek. Probably not.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
For the next couple of years, Natalie traveled back and
forth between Europe and North America, and she spent some
time at a finishing school in New York. Although there
were a number of women's colleges by this point, she
never really aspired to go to one of them, and
she also did not aspire to get married. Seeing the
realities of her parents' marriage had made her wary of
(13:25):
the whole institution, and seeing how her father behaved while
drunk also led her to avoid alcohol.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Getting married was the expected path for her, though, and
since she was witty and vivacious, beautiful, and very rich,
she attracted plenty of suitors. She liked the attention, she
liked to flirt, but she made it clear that she
was not interested in these men. But then, in eighteen
ninety five, she met Robert Kelso Cassatt, nephew of Mary Cassat,
(13:57):
and he fell deeply in love with her. Natalie told
him directly that she was interested in women and not men,
and he proposed that they get married anyway, their relationship
to one another would be platonic, and each of them
would be free to see other people. At least in theory,
this seemed like an ideal scenario. Bob would get to
(14:17):
marry the woman he was in love with, Natalie would
get to marry a man, which is what society and
particularly her father expected of her, and it was also
a man she liked, even if she wasn't physically attracted
to him, and they'd each meet their physical needs with
other people, something that Bob thought that he could handle.
By the time Natalie had her formal society debut, they
(14:39):
were unofficially engaged. We will pause here for a second
to talk about Natalie Clifford Barney's thoughts on monogamy, because
they were at play here. Of course, they would also
be a very big part of the rest of her life.
She really advocated for having lots of lovers without being
jealous or possessive of anybody. She had a number of
(15:01):
long term relationships that overlapped with one another, some of
them lasting for decades. Later in her life, she sorted
all of these into three broad categories. There were the liaisons,
the demi liaisons, and the adventures. The liaisons were the
most important of them.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Some writers discuss Barney's concurrent relationships in terms of infidelity,
but that has some connotations of secrecy or of deception
or breaking a commitment to be faithful to someone. Barney
did make commitments to some of the women she was
involved with, but those commitments did not involve being monogamous. Yeah,
(15:40):
she might commit to like somebody being first in her heart,
but like not to just excluding other people from her life.
For example, in eighteen nineteen, Natalie Clifford Barney and Elizabeth
de Grimmau wrote up what was basically a marriage contract,
and this was not the only such commitment that she
(16:01):
made with another woman. By that point, they had been
together for nine years, during which they had each also
been involved with other people at various points, and Elizabeth
de Grandma was married to a man, although that marriage
had been horrifically abusive. This contract set in part quote,
Adultery is inevitable in these relationships when there is no prejudice,
(16:25):
no religion other than feelings, no laws other than desire,
incapable of vain sacrifices that seemed to be the negation
of life itself. This contract later went on to say quote,
since the danger of affairs is ever present and impossible
to foresee, one will just have to bring the other back,
neither out of revenge nor to limit the other, but
(16:48):
because the union demands it. No other union shall be
so strong as this union, nor another joining so tender,
nor relationships so lasting polyamory would not be coined until
about two decades after Barney's death, and today polyamory has
its own vocabulary and cultural elements that absolutely had not
(17:09):
developed at this point. But there were some similarities in
terms of the idea that everyone in these relationships was
meant to know about the other partners, to consent to
being involved, and to approach it all with a sense
of trust. But all of that is way more true
in terms of how Barney conceptualized these relationships than how
(17:29):
they actually worked in practice. Sometimes she was really jealous
or possessive. She could be deeply petty when this was
the case. There were times when she would try to
keep her partners from seeing other people or from seeing
specific other people. And then there were also times when
one of her partners, who had at least theoretically agreed
(17:51):
to this kind of open relationship, did the same thing
to her. Sometimes somebody thought they would be okay with
Barney's other relationlationships until they were actually in the middle
of a relationship with her.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
At various points there was just a lot of drama
and mess and angst. We're not going to like go
through all the drama with all of the relationships we're
going to talk of, but like there was a lot
simultaneously though Natalie Clifford, Barney maintained lifelong friendships, sometimes very
(18:25):
close friendships with a lot of these women after their
romance had ended, even if that romance had been like
really tumultuous. So to return to the timeline, one of
the people who thought they would be okay with Barney's
other relationships but turned out not to be was Bob Cassot.
He visited her in Paris in the spring of eighteen
(18:45):
ninety nine, so about four years into their relationship. By
that point, their engagement was considered official enough that Barney
was allowed to be out with him unchaperoned. They met
up with a woman named Carmen Rossi, who was one
of Alice Barney's favor art models. By this point, Alice
Barney had studied painting with James McNeil Whistler and was
(19:05):
hosting a salon out of her Paris apartment. Barney and
Rossi already had a sexual relationship, which Cassatt knew about.
They all went to a restaurant that had these small
dining rooms that were basically made for privacy the view
of the room was blocked by a screen, and the
wait staff did not enter beyond that screen unless they
(19:28):
were invited to do so. Rossi and Barney became increasingly
affectionate with each other, so Cassatt decided that he would
leave them alone for a little while. He did not
actually leave the room, though, he watched what they were
doing from behind that screen and eventually started audibly sobbing.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
This led to an argument between him and Barney. She
was really frustrated by the fact that he was the
one who suggested they have a sexless open marriage, and
now the very first time he had experienced firsthand what
that would mean, he was breaking down and describing it
as unbearable.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Their engagement was not immediately over, though Natalie's father had
started to make some preliminary plans for the wedding and
for how her dowry would be handled. By the time,
Bob apparently decided he was not up for this after all,
and he doesn't seem to have formally told her that
it was over. She soon learned from friends, though, that
(20:30):
he had married Amanda Drexel Fell known as Many in
January of nineteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
We'll get to some things that were happening simultaneously in
Natalie's life. After We paused for a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
In nineteen hundred, when she was twenty three, Natalie Clifford
Barney published her first book. This was a chap book
length collection of poetry called kilk portraits sont de femme
or some portrait Sonnets of Women. This had four illustrations
that were created by her mother, Alice. There are a
(21:12):
bunch of accounts that say that Alice didn't know that
these were love poems to women. I kind of feel
like that was only really possible if she just didn't
read it, although there were some early reviews of the
book that seemed to have been oblivious to that aspect
of it. A number of these poems were dedicated to
(21:32):
specific women, although only by their initials. Those women included
Natalie's first love, Eva Palmer, and Pauline Tarn, who wrote
sapphic poetry under the pen named Rene Vivien. We have
not mentioned Pauline yet, but she and Natalie had started
seeing one another in eighteen ninety nine. There was also
one to actor Sarah Bernhardt, following her appearance in the
(21:56):
role of Napoleon. The second in the play leglo.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
In the words of a Washington Post article on Natalie
and her sister Laura that was published eleven years later, quote,
those poems scandalized Washington. They were written in French. The
French was very good, but the tone of the verse
was very unconventional. According to Barney, at some point a
New York City gossip magazine called Town Topics the Journal
(22:24):
of Society published an article about this book that was
called Sappho Sings in Washington.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
This magazine really existed, and Barney mentioned this article and
the furor that it caused a number of times in
her own writing, but biographer Suzanne Rodriguez, author of Wild Heart,
Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris, was
not able to find an actual copy of it. At
some point, though, Natalie's father, Albert, read the article and
(22:54):
was outraged and bordered a ship to Europe, where he
stormed the publisher's office in Paris and demanded to buy
all the remaining copies of the book and the printing
plates so that he could destroy them.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Then he shamed his wife for her having been involved
with it.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Alice was initially disgusted and horrified at the realization of
what this book was about and what that meant about
her daughter. She eventually seems to have come to see
her daughter's sexuality as part of who she was, but
their relationship was always really complicated after this, and it
also seems like Alice felt conflicted about it for the
(23:33):
rest of her life. Like twenty years later, when Alice
was in the middle of some drama of her own,
she was supposed to stay with Natalie in Paris for
a while, but after they had a series of arguments,
Alice abruptly changed her mind, and she said outright that
she disapproved of Natalie and that staying with her at
(23:54):
her house would make it seem otherwise.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
In spite of her parents' reactions and the fact that
some of her society friends back in Washington d C
cut ties with her, Natalie kept living her life in
the way that she wanted to live it. In addition
to her relationship with her mother's art model Carmen Rossi,
in eighteen ninety nine, she had started seeing Cortizon Leande
de Pougee. Natalie had seen Leanne while driving in a
(24:19):
carriage with a male friend, and she had been instantly captivated,
she bought a page costume and went to visit her,
saying that she was a page of love sent by Sappho.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
These two women gave very different accounts of how this
was received in each of their written works. In Leanne
de Pougee's Idel Safique, Barney was frivolous and worshipful, but
in Barney's memoir Secret, she told Depougee that she should
stop being a cortisan, and Depouge was so insulted by
(24:52):
this that she demanded that Barney leave. This was a
case where like Barney supported the idea of a woman's
autonomy over her own body, but Depugie's work as a courtisan,
especially with male clients, really bothered her, and she kept
trying to get her to stop.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Barney wrote her memoir Secret in the nineteen forties and
did not publish them, but leand de Pouge published her
Idel Safique in nineteen oh one, and this novel is
often described as a thinly veiled autobiography, and it's one
of a number of thinly veiled autobiographies that Natalie Clifford
Barney would either feature in or write herself during her lifetime.
(25:33):
Leand de Pougie was a famous courtisan and this book
was scandalous, so of course it was also a bestseller.
People in Paris knew that the rich American woman depicted
in the book was Natalie Clifford Barney. She started to
develop a reputation as a notorious pursuer of women. Her
relationship with Pauline Tarn also known as poet Rene Vivier,
(25:56):
started in nineteen hundred when it came to things like
that their love of poetry, they were really well matched.
Although it is generally agreed, including by me, Rene Vivier
was a much better poet than Natalie Clifford Barney was.
Beyond that, though, their differences caused some challenges in their relationship.
(26:16):
Natalie was such a socialite and she loved to go
to parties and play host and make friends, but Pauline
was almost reclusive. At one point, they took a trip
to Maine together and Pauline apparently intentionally did not bring
any gowns with her, which were required to go to
the formal dinners in the evenings on the ship. That way,
(26:38):
shouldn't have to go to those dinners. She also skipped
a lot of the social events in bar Harbor, which
were things that Natalie was genuinely excited about going to.
Natalie also disliked drugs and alcohol after her experiences growing
up with her father, and she avoided them, but that
was not the case for Pauline. On the nights when
(26:58):
she didn't go to those formal dinner she spent dinner
time alone in her stateroom taking sedatives.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Pauline was one of the people who didn't wind up
liking Natalie having other partners, and then Natalie also felt
threatened by a relationship that Pauline started with baroness Ellen
von Zuilin de Nuivel sometime in nineteen oh one. They
went through a series of jealousies and breakups and reconnections,
getting back together in nineteen oh four and taking a
(27:26):
trip to Midelini on the island of Lesbos to explore
the possibility of starting a women's colony there, inspired by
Sappho's school. Eventually they broke up for good, but they
remained friends afterward.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Sometimes Natalie Clifford Barney is framed as having been immensely
cruel toward Pauline tarn driving her to try to take
her own life. Their relationship was definitely tumultuous, but Tarn
also had a rich creative life, publishing multiple volumes of
poetry and prose between nineteen oh one. When her romance
relationship sort of ended with Barney in nineteen oh eight,
(28:03):
they got back together briefly in nineteen oh four.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Her long term.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Relationship with Helen ended in nineteen oh seven when Helene
left her for another woman. Turn tried to take her
own life in nineteen oh eight, and then she died
in nineteen oh nine at the age of thirty two
after a serious illness that was influenced by both heavy
drug use and anarexia.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Along with her mother and sister Natalie Clifford, Barney is
sometimes also blamed for contributing to her father's death. Albert
had been noticeably unwell as early as eighteen ninety nine,
and he had a heart attack in nineteen oh two.
This is actually his second heart attack, and it was
not long after getting into a dispute with Alice and
(28:46):
Laura over their involvement with the Bahai Faith. He went
to Europe to try to recuperate from this heart attack
in some of its health spots. Honestly, this seems like
a bad idea to me, because that put him a
lot closer to the dress of all the gossip about
Natalie and her life in Paris. He eventually developed pleurisy
there and got too sick to be able to make
(29:08):
the voyage home, and he died in Monte Carlo after
another heart attack. Later on that year.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Albert Barney left an estate with a value of about
nine million dollars to be held in trust, with the
income from it to be divided evenly among his wife
and two daughters. That made all three of these women
independently wealthy, which of course changed all of their lives considerably.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
And we will be talking about that more in our
next episode. And before, listener, mail, I have a correction
because the pup couple of people have pointed out that
in our episode on Emily Warren Roebling, I say she
died in eighteen ninety three, and then I also we
(29:55):
also say she died in nineteen oh three. Nineteen oh
three is the cre I tried to go figure out,
how did I make that mistake, because that's not even
like a typo, that's a fully different century. I don't
know how I made that error. Yes, Emily Warren Robeling
died in nineteen oh three, not eighteen ninety three, and
(30:17):
I got it in there two different times because at
like I put eighteen ninety three there for some reason,
I don't know why, and then I picked up that
same wrong year later on in the episode. So sorry
about that. Listener mail we have is from Eva, and
Eva wrote to say, I just listened to The Mourning
(30:41):
Dove behind the scenes that I somehow missed when it aired,
and I heard highly speculate about other vendors called book
barn in the Northeast. So you probably got lots of
mail about all the book barns in the Northeast. I
figured there are worse things to get lots of mail about,
so I wanted to mention book Barn of the finger
Lakes and dry in New York, which is an old
(31:02):
actual barn that was converted into a labyrinthine bookstore that
has been around for many decades, and it brags it
has three hundred categories of books. If you're ever passing
through Dryden, it's a trip. And then Eva sent a
link to a video on YouTube about the book Barn
(31:23):
of the finger Lakes and Dryed in New York. We
did get a couple of emails about various book barns.
I liked this one in particular because like the crowded,
very tall shelves reminded me of a couple of used
bookstores that I have been in in my life. I
have a fondness for them, and this one in particular,
(31:47):
I was like, Oh, I can sort of imagine myself
in there, even though I have never been to that
particular bookstore before. So thank you so much for that
email and the link to the video. I did not
watch all of it, but I did watch part of it.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast, or at history podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com, and we are on social media at
(32:09):
miss in History, and you can subscribe to our show
on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to
get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(32:30):
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
If you listen to the listener mail segments at the
end of our episodes, you might remember that Kristen wrote
in about a Marie Lawrence exhibition at the Barnes Foundation
in Philadelphia. I did indeed manage to get down there
before it closed on January twenty first. It was absolutely
worth it, even though I had some weather related travel
(00:37):
stress and I picked up a cold that has been
lingering for nearly three weeks now. If you're like Tracy,
that's COVID, it's not COVID. Negative for COVID, including on
a molecular test, not COVID anyway, though the exhibits introductory
signage included this, Before and after the war, Lawrence sah
(01:02):
attended salons inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, held
at the Paris home of lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney,
and standing there in the museum, I was like, Okay,
I'm taking that as a message from the universe to
finally do an episode on Natalie Clifford Barney. Her name
has come up before, including in our episodes on both
(01:26):
Brie Lawrencen and Collette, who we talked about last year,
and then she's also she was connected to a bunch
of other people we have talked about in the past,
including Isidora Duncan, Edna Saint Vincent Malay and Gertrude Stein
and Alice by Toklas. And then every time her name
comes up in something that I'm researching, I'm like, we
(01:47):
gotta do an episode on her sometime, and so now
we finally are. I did not mean for this to
be a two part episode. I got to the end
of my note taking phase in what I did not
even feel like were particularly like. I didn't feel like
I was taking overly detailed notes. But I got to
the end of notes and I had a word count
(02:09):
that was already a whole episode, and I was like, oh,
I'm in trouble. So this became two parts. Today we
are going to talk about Natalie Clifford Barney's upbringing, her
young adult life in Paris, and then the death of
her father leaving her independently wealthy. And then next time
on Wednesday, we will talk about the Paris Salon that
(02:32):
she became really famous for.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Natalie Clifford Barney was born in Dayton, Ohio, on October
thirty first, eighteen seventy six. She loved that this was
her birthday. She felt like her life contained a lot
of duality, so she liked that October thirty first had
connections to both Christian and pagan observances. Later, she also
developed an affinity for astrology and numerology, and she formed
(02:56):
a club called the Scorpions after their astrological sign of
Scorpio for people with the same birthday, and one of
the other members of that club was Marie Lawrence Soon.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Natalie was the first daughter born to Albert Clifford Barney
and Alice Pike Barney, who were both from wealthy families.
Albert's father had made a fortune manufacturing railway cars, including
for the Pullman Company, and Alice's father was an entrepreneur
who ran a dry goods store and distilleries, doing well
enough that he eventually moved into investing in things like
(03:28):
property and trolley systems and opera houses. Thanks to those
opera houses, guests at the Pike home when Alice was
young included past podcast subjects Marie Taglioni and Lola Montes,
and Alice developed a deep love of music and the arts.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
The Barney family moved to Cincinnati when Natalie was still
a baby, and her younger sister, Laura was born there
in eighteen seventy nine. While Natalie was always creative and
outgoing and sociable in many ways, Laura was nearly her oppice.
She was just a lot more quiet and reserved. But
the two of them had a very tight and lifelong
bond as sisters.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
While their life at home was financially pretty comfortable, it
was not always happy. Albert and Alice's marriage was strained
pretty soon after the wedding. Alice had come to see
him as narrow minded and prejudiced. He also had a
lot of affairs over the course of the marriage, and
there's really not evidence that Alice did the same, but
(04:27):
he was deeply jealous and possessive of her.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
For example, not long after they got married, Albert found
letters that explorer and writer Henry Morton Stanley had written
to Alice. Henry and Alice had met in New York
when Alice was seventeen and Henry was thirty three, and
he eventually proposed, but Alice's mother had sent her back
to Dayton to separate the two of them. When Albert
(04:52):
found these letters, Alice insisted they were nothing to be
threatened by, but he made her burn them all while
he was watching Albert. It's jealousy of and antipathy for
Henry Morton Stanley went on for years, and it didn't
help that newspaper reporters writing about Stanley often brought up
the fact that he had once been betrothed to an
heiress who had left him and married someone else. It
(05:15):
was one of those details they liked to drop in
reporting that was not about his relationships at all, They
just throw that in there. Albert's behavior could also be
really frightening, especially when he was intoxicated. Once, after he
had a fight with Alice, he took Natalie and Laura
out of the house and boarded a train with them
and then threatens to kill all three of them by
(05:37):
throwing them off of it. He only stopped when Natalie
grabbed the emergency brake and threatens a pullet and make
a scene. When Natalie and Laura were still young children,
the family started spending their summers at seaside resorts. When
Natalie was six, she had a formative experience. While they
were in Long Beach, New York. Natalie was trying to
(05:57):
run away from a pack of boys when a tall
man came to her rescue and picked her up. That
tall man turned out to be Oscar Wilde, who was
in New York on a North American tour. Natalie later
called this her first adventure.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
This was a formative moment for her mother too. The
next day, Oscar Wilde showed up at the beach and
struck up a conversation with Alice. They were essentially strangers,
but they wound up having this really intimate discussion about
Alice's life and her marriage. Alice and Oscar were confidants
until Oscar had to go back to his tour, and
(06:33):
their conversations really highlighted for her how unhappy she was
and how her passions for art and music had been
squashed through her marriage to Albert.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Soon after, Alice convinced Albert to take a trip to
Europe under the guise of looking for a boarding school
for the girls to attend when they got a little older.
Albert was of the opinion that a European education would
be necessary for the girls to attract suitable husbands, so
he agreed to this trip. But Alice also had another
goal in mind, which was figuring out how she could
(07:06):
get herself to Europe to study painting.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
About four years later, in eighteen eighty seven, Albert's mother
died and Albert inherited enough money that the family became
really wealthy. This was wealthy enough to actually afford the
kind of lifestyle they'd been living for the last few years,
and to kick it up a notch. Not long after
the estate was settled, Albert started construction on two new homes.
(07:32):
One was the family's main residence in Washington, d c.
The other was a summer cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine.
Although the word cottage has connotations of something small and quaint,
a lot of the so called cottages built in North
America during the Gilded Age were quite the opposite. They
were literally mansions. This Bar Harbor cottage, known as Bannyburn,
(07:57):
had twenty seven rooms, including seven bedrooms just for the servants.
This was also the year that Natalie and Laura were
sent to boarding school in France, to a school called
Le Rouche, which they had visited on that earlier trip
to Europe. Natalie was eleven at this point and her
sister was seven, and Alice convinced their father that since
(08:19):
they were so young and had never been away from
home like this before, that she should go to France
as well and rent an apartment in Paris. Although this
was really about her getting away from Albert and getting
to study painting, this transition really was hard for the girls.
When their parents had first tried to drop them off
at the school, they were both so upset that the
(08:40):
family wound up going back to Paris for a while
before trying again. Yeah, this is also like the pattern
for the rest of Alice's life was finding reasons, like
finding reasonable explanations for her to be in Europe studying
painting instead of back in the United States with her husband.
(09:00):
There was an irony in this choice of boarding school though,
as we said, in Albert's mind this education was going
to help his daughters attract suitable husbands, and Le Rouche
was a prestigious school. Its curriculum was focused on the
kinds of subjects that were considered appropriate for the future
wives of rich men, so things like languages, music, poetry,
(09:24):
deportment and drawing, but the school's founder, Maurice vest also
she thought that girls should be able to think for themselves.
By the time Natalie and Laura enrolled at the school,
she herself had moved on to start a school outside London,
where one of her students would be the famously headstrong
(09:45):
Eleanor Roosevelt. But the school was still very focused on
teaching girls to make their own decisions and to think
about things logically and rationally. This school they were sent
to in France was really not one that was going
to teach them to be obedient to their parents or
subservient to future husbands. Meanwhile, Alice Barney was making a
(10:09):
serious study of art. One of the paintings she created
during her daughter's first term at school, called Paissan Polonaise
or Polish Peasant, was accepted at the Paris Salon in
eighteen eighty nine. We will get to Natalie's life at
school after a quick sponsor break. While in school at LaRouche,
(10:37):
Natalie Clifford Barney was an excellent student in some subjects,
kind of an okay student in other ones. It seems
like it really depended on whether this interested her or not.
She had started learning French from a governess earlier in
her life, and French was the only language allowed to
be spoken at LaRouche. This put her on the path
(10:58):
to becoming a fluent speaker of both French and English,
and most of her later riding was in French. Natalie
wrote and played the violin, and she also played tennis
and croquet, and she spent as much time as she
could riding horses. Horseback riding was one of her great
loves in life. She also became increasingly free spirited and rebellious,
(11:21):
so things like refusing to wear corsets and insisting on
riding a stride on her horse instead of side saddle,
as women and girls were expected to do.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
And she also realized that she was attracted to other girls.
We have talked on the show before about how for
much of the nineteenth century there was a lot of
stigma around lesbianism in adult women, but it was simultaneously
considered normal and healthy for girls to have physically affectionate
relationships and even crushes on one another. This was thought
(11:55):
of as sort of a necessary step in becoming a
good wife to a man. People only started to regard
these relationships with suspicion if girls got too old for
it or if their relationships were too intense. But by
the time she was about twelve, Natalie understood that her
attraction to girls was not just part of her childhood,
(12:15):
that it would be central to her entire life.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Although Natalie had crushes and flirtations at LaRouche, it seems
like the first time another girl returned her affections in
the same way was in Bar Harbor in eighteen ninety three.
Eva Palmer's family also summered there, and she and Natalie
had become friends a few summers before. When their relationship
(12:39):
moved from platonic to physical, Natalie was sixteen and Eva
was nineteen. Their first sexual experience together was after Eva
read a poem by Sappho at a variety show. She
read this in its original Greek, so unless they knew Greek,
the people and the audience were not really aware of
its significance. Can't imagine there were a lot of people
(13:02):
fluent in Greek. Probably not.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
For the next couple of years, Natalie traveled back and
forth between Europe and North America, and she spent some
time at a finishing school in New York. Although there
were a number of women's colleges by this point, she
never really aspired to go to one of them, and
she also did not aspire to get married. Seeing the
realities of her parents' marriage had made her wary of
(13:25):
the whole institution, and seeing how her father behaved while
drunk also led her to avoid alcohol.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Getting married was the expected path for her, though, and
since she was witty and vivacious, beautiful, and very rich,
she attracted plenty of suitors. She liked the attention, she
liked to flirt, but she made it clear that she
was not interested in these men. But then, in eighteen
ninety five, she met Robert Kelso Cassatt, nephew of Mary Cassat,
(13:57):
and he fell deeply in love with her. Natalie told
him directly that she was interested in women and not men,
and he proposed that they get married anyway, their relationship
to one another would be platonic, and each of them
would be free to see other people. At least in theory,
this seemed like an ideal scenario. Bob would get to
(14:17):
marry the woman he was in love with, Natalie would
get to marry a man, which is what society and
particularly her father expected of her, and it was also
a man she liked, even if she wasn't physically attracted
to him, and they'd each meet their physical needs with
other people, something that Bob thought that he could handle.
By the time Natalie had her formal society debut, they
(14:39):
were unofficially engaged. We will pause here for a second
to talk about Natalie Clifford Barney's thoughts on monogamy, because
they were at play here. Of course, they would also
be a very big part of the rest of her life.
She really advocated for having lots of lovers without being
jealous or possessive of anybody. She had a number of
(15:01):
long term relationships that overlapped with one another, some of
them lasting for decades. Later in her life, she sorted
all of these into three broad categories. There were the liaisons,
the demi liaisons, and the adventures. The liaisons were the
most important of them.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
Some writers discuss Barney's concurrent relationships in terms of infidelity,
but that has some connotations of secrecy or of deception
or breaking a commitment to be faithful to someone. Barney
did make commitments to some of the women she was
involved with, but those commitments did not involve being monogamous. Yeah,
(15:40):
she might commit to like somebody being first in her heart,
but like not to just excluding other people from her life.
For example, in eighteen nineteen, Natalie Clifford Barney and Elizabeth
de Grimmau wrote up what was basically a marriage contract,
and this was not the only such commitment that she
(16:01):
made with another woman. By that point, they had been
together for nine years, during which they had each also
been involved with other people at various points, and Elizabeth
de Grandma was married to a man, although that marriage
had been horrifically abusive. This contract set in part quote,
Adultery is inevitable in these relationships when there is no prejudice,
(16:25):
no religion other than feelings, no laws other than desire,
incapable of vain sacrifices that seemed to be the negation
of life itself. This contract later went on to say quote,
since the danger of affairs is ever present and impossible
to foresee, one will just have to bring the other back,
neither out of revenge nor to limit the other, but
(16:48):
because the union demands it. No other union shall be
so strong as this union, nor another joining so tender,
nor relationships so lasting polyamory would not be coined until
about two decades after Barney's death, and today polyamory has
its own vocabulary and cultural elements that absolutely had not
(17:09):
developed at this point. But there were some similarities in
terms of the idea that everyone in these relationships was
meant to know about the other partners, to consent to
being involved, and to approach it all with a sense
of trust. But all of that is way more true
in terms of how Barney conceptualized these relationships than how
(17:29):
they actually worked in practice. Sometimes she was really jealous
or possessive. She could be deeply petty when this was
the case. There were times when she would try to
keep her partners from seeing other people or from seeing
specific other people. And then there were also times when
one of her partners, who had at least theoretically agreed
(17:51):
to this kind of open relationship, did the same thing
to her. Sometimes somebody thought they would be okay with
Barney's other relationlationships until they were actually in the middle
of a relationship with her.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
At various points there was just a lot of drama
and mess and angst. We're not going to like go
through all the drama with all of the relationships we're
going to talk of, but like there was a lot
simultaneously though Natalie Clifford, Barney maintained lifelong friendships, sometimes very
(18:25):
close friendships with a lot of these women after their
romance had ended, even if that romance had been like
really tumultuous. So to return to the timeline, one of
the people who thought they would be okay with Barney's
other relationships but turned out not to be was Bob Cassot.
He visited her in Paris in the spring of eighteen
(18:45):
ninety nine, so about four years into their relationship. By
that point, their engagement was considered official enough that Barney
was allowed to be out with him unchaperoned. They met
up with a woman named Carmen Rossi, who was one
of Alice Barney's favor art models. By this point, Alice
Barney had studied painting with James McNeil Whistler and was
(19:05):
hosting a salon out of her Paris apartment. Barney and
Rossi already had a sexual relationship, which Cassatt knew about.
They all went to a restaurant that had these small
dining rooms that were basically made for privacy the view
of the room was blocked by a screen, and the
wait staff did not enter beyond that screen unless they
(19:28):
were invited to do so. Rossi and Barney became increasingly
affectionate with each other, so Cassatt decided that he would
leave them alone for a little while. He did not
actually leave the room, though, he watched what they were
doing from behind that screen and eventually started audibly sobbing.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
This led to an argument between him and Barney. She
was really frustrated by the fact that he was the
one who suggested they have a sexless open marriage, and
now the very first time he had experienced firsthand what
that would mean, he was breaking down and describing it
as unbearable.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Their engagement was not immediately over, though Natalie's father had
started to make some preliminary plans for the wedding and
for how her dowry would be handled. By the time,
Bob apparently decided he was not up for this after all,
and he doesn't seem to have formally told her that
it was over. She soon learned from friends, though, that
(20:30):
he had married Amanda Drexel Fell known as Many in
January of nineteen hundred.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
We'll get to some things that were happening simultaneously in
Natalie's life. After We paused for a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
In nineteen hundred, when she was twenty three, Natalie Clifford
Barney published her first book. This was a chap book
length collection of poetry called kilk portraits sont de femme
or some portrait Sonnets of Women. This had four illustrations
that were created by her mother, Alice. There are a
(21:12):
bunch of accounts that say that Alice didn't know that
these were love poems to women. I kind of feel
like that was only really possible if she just didn't
read it, although there were some early reviews of the
book that seemed to have been oblivious to that aspect
of it. A number of these poems were dedicated to
(21:32):
specific women, although only by their initials. Those women included
Natalie's first love, Eva Palmer, and Pauline Tarn, who wrote
sapphic poetry under the pen named Rene Vivien. We have
not mentioned Pauline yet, but she and Natalie had started
seeing one another in eighteen ninety nine. There was also
one to actor Sarah Bernhardt, following her appearance in the
(21:56):
role of Napoleon. The second in the play leglo.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
In the words of a Washington Post article on Natalie
and her sister Laura that was published eleven years later, quote,
those poems scandalized Washington. They were written in French. The
French was very good, but the tone of the verse
was very unconventional. According to Barney, at some point a
New York City gossip magazine called Town Topics the Journal
(22:24):
of Society published an article about this book that was
called Sappho Sings in Washington.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
This magazine really existed, and Barney mentioned this article and
the furor that it caused a number of times in
her own writing, but biographer Suzanne Rodriguez, author of Wild Heart,
Natalie Clifford Barney and the Decadence of Literary Paris, was
not able to find an actual copy of it. At
some point, though, Natalie's father, Albert, read the article and
(22:54):
was outraged and bordered a ship to Europe, where he
stormed the publisher's office in Paris and demanded to buy
all the remaining copies of the book and the printing
plates so that he could destroy them.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Then he shamed his wife for her having been involved
with it.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Alice was initially disgusted and horrified at the realization of
what this book was about and what that meant about
her daughter. She eventually seems to have come to see
her daughter's sexuality as part of who she was, but
their relationship was always really complicated after this, and it
also seems like Alice felt conflicted about it for the
(23:33):
rest of her life. Like twenty years later, when Alice
was in the middle of some drama of her own,
she was supposed to stay with Natalie in Paris for
a while, but after they had a series of arguments,
Alice abruptly changed her mind, and she said outright that
she disapproved of Natalie and that staying with her at
(23:54):
her house would make it seem otherwise.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
In spite of her parents' reactions and the fact that
some of her society friends back in Washington d C
cut ties with her, Natalie kept living her life in
the way that she wanted to live it. In addition
to her relationship with her mother's art model Carmen Rossi,
in eighteen ninety nine, she had started seeing Cortizon Leande
de Pougee. Natalie had seen Leanne while driving in a
(24:19):
carriage with a male friend, and she had been instantly captivated,
she bought a page costume and went to visit her,
saying that she was a page of love sent by Sappho.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
These two women gave very different accounts of how this
was received in each of their written works. In Leanne
de Pougee's Idel Safique, Barney was frivolous and worshipful, but
in Barney's memoir Secret, she told Depougee that she should
stop being a cortisan, and Depouge was so insulted by
(24:52):
this that she demanded that Barney leave. This was a
case where like Barney supported the idea of a woman's
autonomy over her own body, but Depugie's work as a courtisan,
especially with male clients, really bothered her, and she kept
trying to get her to stop.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Barney wrote her memoir Secret in the nineteen forties and
did not publish them, but leand de Pouge published her
Idel Safique in nineteen oh one, and this novel is
often described as a thinly veiled autobiography, and it's one
of a number of thinly veiled autobiographies that Natalie Clifford
Barney would either feature in or write herself during her lifetime.
(25:33):
Leand de Pougie was a famous courtisan and this book
was scandalous, so of course it was also a bestseller.
People in Paris knew that the rich American woman depicted
in the book was Natalie Clifford Barney. She started to
develop a reputation as a notorious pursuer of women. Her
relationship with Pauline Tarn also known as poet Rene Vivier,
(25:56):
started in nineteen hundred when it came to things like
that their love of poetry, they were really well matched.
Although it is generally agreed, including by me, Rene Vivier
was a much better poet than Natalie Clifford Barney was.
Beyond that, though, their differences caused some challenges in their relationship.
(26:16):
Natalie was such a socialite and she loved to go
to parties and play host and make friends, but Pauline
was almost reclusive. At one point, they took a trip
to Maine together and Pauline apparently intentionally did not bring
any gowns with her, which were required to go to
the formal dinners in the evenings on the ship. That way,
(26:38):
shouldn't have to go to those dinners. She also skipped
a lot of the social events in bar Harbor, which
were things that Natalie was genuinely excited about going to.
Natalie also disliked drugs and alcohol after her experiences growing
up with her father, and she avoided them, but that
was not the case for Pauline. On the nights when
(26:58):
she didn't go to those formal dinner she spent dinner
time alone in her stateroom taking sedatives.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Pauline was one of the people who didn't wind up
liking Natalie having other partners, and then Natalie also felt
threatened by a relationship that Pauline started with baroness Ellen
von Zuilin de Nuivel sometime in nineteen oh one. They
went through a series of jealousies and breakups and reconnections,
getting back together in nineteen oh four and taking a
(27:26):
trip to Midelini on the island of Lesbos to explore
the possibility of starting a women's colony there, inspired by
Sappho's school. Eventually they broke up for good, but they
remained friends afterward.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Sometimes Natalie Clifford Barney is framed as having been immensely
cruel toward Pauline tarn driving her to try to take
her own life. Their relationship was definitely tumultuous, but Tarn
also had a rich creative life, publishing multiple volumes of
poetry and prose between nineteen oh one. When her romance
relationship sort of ended with Barney in nineteen oh eight,
(28:03):
they got back together briefly in nineteen oh four.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Her long term.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
Relationship with Helen ended in nineteen oh seven when Helene
left her for another woman. Turn tried to take her
own life in nineteen oh eight, and then she died
in nineteen oh nine at the age of thirty two
after a serious illness that was influenced by both heavy
drug use and anarexia.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Along with her mother and sister Natalie Clifford, Barney is
sometimes also blamed for contributing to her father's death. Albert
had been noticeably unwell as early as eighteen ninety nine,
and he had a heart attack in nineteen oh two.
This is actually his second heart attack, and it was
not long after getting into a dispute with Alice and
(28:46):
Laura over their involvement with the Bahai Faith. He went
to Europe to try to recuperate from this heart attack
in some of its health spots. Honestly, this seems like
a bad idea to me, because that put him a
lot closer to the dress of all the gossip about
Natalie and her life in Paris. He eventually developed pleurisy
there and got too sick to be able to make
(29:08):
the voyage home, and he died in Monte Carlo after
another heart attack. Later on that year.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Albert Barney left an estate with a value of about
nine million dollars to be held in trust, with the
income from it to be divided evenly among his wife
and two daughters. That made all three of these women
independently wealthy, which of course changed all of their lives considerably.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
And we will be talking about that more in our
next episode. And before, listener, mail, I have a correction
because the pup couple of people have pointed out that
in our episode on Emily Warren Roebling, I say she
died in eighteen ninety three, and then I also we
(29:55):
also say she died in nineteen oh three. Nineteen oh
three is the cre I tried to go figure out,
how did I make that mistake, because that's not even
like a typo, that's a fully different century. I don't
know how I made that error. Yes, Emily Warren Robeling
died in nineteen oh three, not eighteen ninety three, and
(30:17):
I got it in there two different times because at
like I put eighteen ninety three there for some reason,
I don't know why, and then I picked up that
same wrong year later on in the episode. So sorry
about that. Listener mail we have is from Eva, and
Eva wrote to say, I just listened to The Mourning
(30:41):
Dove behind the scenes that I somehow missed when it aired,
and I heard highly speculate about other vendors called book
barn in the Northeast. So you probably got lots of
mail about all the book barns in the Northeast. I
figured there are worse things to get lots of mail about,
so I wanted to mention book Barn of the finger
Lakes and dry in New York, which is an old
(31:02):
actual barn that was converted into a labyrinthine bookstore that
has been around for many decades, and it brags it
has three hundred categories of books. If you're ever passing
through Dryden, it's a trip. And then Eva sent a
link to a video on YouTube about the book Barn
(31:23):
of the finger Lakes and Dryed in New York. We
did get a couple of emails about various book barns.
I liked this one in particular because like the crowded,
very tall shelves reminded me of a couple of used
bookstores that I have been in in my life. I
have a fondness for them, and this one in particular,
(31:47):
I was like, Oh, I can sort of imagine myself
in there, even though I have never been to that
particular bookstore before. So thank you so much for that
email and the link to the video. I did not
watch all of it, but I did watch part of it.
If you would like to send us a note about
this or any other podcast, or at history podcast at
iHeartRadio dot com, and we are on social media at
(32:09):
miss in History, and you can subscribe to our show
on the iHeartRadio app and wherever else you'd like to
get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(32:30):
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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