Born in England, educated in Paris, orphaned at a young age, Pauline always dreamed of becoming a great French poet. Her ambitions were clear. In her early notebooks, she translated portions of Dante from Italian into French as a literary rite of passage.[1] She had been living in Paris for about a year before she met Natalie. Her closet friends were the American Shillito sisters, living around the corner. Pauline was deeply in love with Violet Shillito, who had taken another lover, Mabel Dodge.[2] When Pauline met Natalie, Pauline was growing artistically at a rapid clip, but in her personal life, she was nursing a wounded pride. Her unrequited love for Violet had shown her one thing: she was certain of her desire for women. In November 1899, Natalie fit the bill.

The first thing to capture Natalie’s attention was Pauline’s poetry. While Natalie would always prefer sex as the way to get to know the women in her life, she could see that with Pauline, there was the added benefit of their shared ambition to become French literary stars. They looked good together on paper and on stage. The beginning of their affair is beautifully rendered in Barney’s I Remember Her (Je me souviens…) (1910).[3] All through that winter into the spring, they lived their own sapphic idyll. Pauline’s letters to Natalie glow with rapturous detail.[4] Natalie was equally inspired. It seemed their poetic ambitions were within reach.

The Barneys spent every summer in Bar Harbor, Maine, where they had built an imposing cottage, Ban-y-Bryn, on a bluff overlooking the town. This was the paradise of Natalie’s childhood, and she would always want to show it off to her lovers. In 1900, she wanted to show it off to Pauline. Pauline had a younger sister, Antoinette, who was unmarried. Alice Barney extended an invitation to sponsor the Tarns during the Bar Harbor social season.[5] It was not, however, an invitation to come and stay at Ban-y-Bryn.

Alice Barney’s marriage to industrialist Albert Barney had been hanging by a thread since 1876, the year of Natalie’s birth. An alcoholic who became abusive when he was drunk, Albert was also a notorious snob. He was even unpopular with his own family. Alice mainly lived in Paris, where she studied painting with James McNeill Whistler.

Photograph of Alice Barney at Ban-y-Bryn, 1912. Ban-y-Bryn was a center of high society and the social and philanthropic scene during this period. The events that Alice Barney hosted at Ban-y-Bryn were covered regularly by the New York Times. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Alice Pike Barney Papers, Image No. SIA2026-006879.

On the Atlantic crossing, Natalie learned—perhaps for the first time—the truth about Pauline’s chloral hydrate addiction. Barney mentions in her memoirs that she poured Pauline’s drug supply down the head (the ship’s toilet). She does not mention the withdrawal from drug dependency that would have inevitably followed or its consequences once the couple had reached American shores. In any event, what started out as a romantic itinerary on Natalie’s part had already crumbled into something less than romantic once they got to the Maine coast. Pauline was lodged with her family in a hotel in town down the hill. In her letters, Pauline did not hide her disdain for Bar Harbor society.[6] Natalie, trying to make the best of it, introduced Pauline to Eva.

Eva had the contacts to produce and stage sapphic theatricals all over Mount Desert Island, where Bar Harbor was located. All three were now working toward a common goal: writing, scoring, casting, costuming, and staging events to entertain the social register crowd. Eva took charge of the choreography and stage managing, arts she would practice for the rest of her life. The New York press covered many of these events. The Three Sapphos were a success. Unusually for women artists, they united theatrical performance and poetic creation. And what was even more rare—they did so as a group.

When they were not performing, the three of them read poetry, took long walks, experimented with Natalie’s new camera, and swam naked together. Eva and Pauline also studied Greek with Natalie’s sister Laura.

Despite the eroticism of their performances, The Three Sapphos were not all sleeping together. In her letters, Pauline complained that Natalie was neglecting her during this period. Our research suggests that at some point over the summer, sparks reignited between Natalie and Eva and flared up into a burning passion.[7]

Eva and Natalie were both, and would be, polyamorous all their lives.[8] Pauline, however, expected monogamy from Natalie. The events that followed that autumn show that Natalie and Eva went to great lengths to keep their affair a secret from Pauline.

The sexual tension proved too much for Pauline. After complaining at length about how much she loathed her mother, and even threatening to decamp alone for New York, Pauline inexplicably agreed to join her mother on an extended trip to the Midwest. She left on September 24. They would pass through Buffalo to visit cousins in Michigan.[9] From that date until October 10—for over two weeks—Natalie did not write to Pauline, despite Pauline’s epistolary pleas.[10] The silence was unusual. What could explain it?

Letter from Katharine Lürman to Natalie Barney postmarked 6 Oct. 1900. Scholars have taken Natalie at her word when she glossed over the details of her 1900 trip to Bryn Mawr. She stayed at the neighboring girls’s school, the Shipley School, and not on the college campus as she alleged in her memoir. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, fonds Natalie Cifford Barney, NCB-C2-2745-3.

We now know that Eva had taken Natalie to visit Bryn Mawr. Clearly, Natalie was reluctant to explain why. According to one newspaper announcement, Natalie intended to lay the groundwork for future theatrical productions in collaboration with several young ladies from Philadelphia.[11] But we have found no subsequent coverage in the Philadelphia or Bryn Mawr press about any such efforts. Did Eva and Natalie tell a lie in order to throw Pauline off the trail?

If so, that was not the only lie they told. In her later memoirs, Natalie would claim that Eva had kept her rooms in one of the college residence halls.[12] We now know, from the Bryn Mawr SGA records, that Eva could not have kept her rooms. At this time there was an acute shortage of rooms in the residence halls, and the rules limiting residence to current students were strictly enforced. It seems likely that someone at Bryn Mawr—perhaps Lucy Donnelly or even Mamie Gwinn—must have arranged their accommodation. We reason that this would have given all three friends a chance to strategize about how to remain discreet, namely how to make sure Natalie and Lucy never crossed paths.

Eva and Natalie were installed across the street from the college entrance at the Shipley School. A letter from one of Natalie’s conquests, Katharine Lürman, postmarked October 6, reached her there the very next morning.[13] 

Advertisement for the Shipley School, which was founded in 1894 and was a “feeder school” for Bryn Mawr College. The founders of the Shipley School were friends of Helen and Carey Thomas. Many of the school's teachers were also Bryn Mawr College graduates. Courtesy of the Shipley School.

Photograph of the Shipley School campus, 1896. The Shipley School was where Eva’s friends found lodging for her and Natalie during their trip to Bryn Mawr in the fall of 1900. Courtesy of the Shipley School.

Photograph of a reception hall at the Shipley School, 1915. This hall was in one of the buildings where Natalie and Eva would have likely stayed during their fall 1900 visit. Courtesy of the Shipley School.

Why Bryn Mawr? A letter from Natalie to Eva dated October 14 makes it clear that they were sleeping together: “It is no longer my tongue but my soul that caresses you—My soul fully awake that it may love your soul, and rest there as in your arms...ah the warmness of being so together. I would have flame born of it!”[14] Bryn Mawr was their honeymoon.

At least, that was the idea. Natalie was not impressed. In a poem she wrote but never published, “Amid Ladies of the Island,” she recalled with scorn “the girls we used to know at Bryn-Mawr School College / ...The Basket-Ball athletic nimble-footed clear-eyed gang / With 'chums' and 'crushes'? / Who looked the classics instead of learning them!”[15] In the first line, Barney has crossed out “School” and penciled in “College” above it. (She meant Shipley in the town of Bryn Mawr, not the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore.) The cross-out implies that Barney considered the girls’ school interchangeable with the college. There would have been a certain degree of similarity between them. After all, Shipley was one of Bryn Mawr’s two main “feeder schools.” Whether Barney was writing about the school, the college, or both, her portrait of classical beauties who never bothered to learn Greek is an indictment.

Eva had brought Natalie to see the paradise where she had come of age. But it seemed less than a paradise for Natalie, who was determined to live (as we would say) out and proud. Rooms at a girls’ school were hardly conducive to their unbridled passion. Nonetheless, their silence may indicate that they spent more time making love than making plans. If they had ever really dreamed of sapphic theatricals in Philadelphia, they abandoned that idea.

The faculty and administrators returned to Bryn Mawr College by October 2 for convocation at the beginning of the fall semester.[16] At some point within the next few weeks, Natalie sought out Mamie Gwinn.

In one of her later memoirs, Barney gives a sexually charged account of visiting Gwinn in her office that fall in 1900 and reading her a poem:

Après les cours de littérature que présidait le plus érudit et le plus subtil des professeurs, Miss G., à qui j’avais osé montrer mes vers anglais. Elle m’encouragea au point de me recevoir dans son appartement où, assise sur un tabouret à ses pieds, je lui lisais un poème que j’avais composé pour elle. Après ces séances exaltantes, j’allais à la recherche de Renée.[17]

 

After the literature classes taught by the most erudite and subtle of professors, Miss G., to whom I had taken the liberty of showing my English verses. She encouraged me to the point of receiving me in her private rooms, where, seated on a stool at her feet, I read a poem I had composed for her. After these stimulating sessions, I went in search of Renée.[18]

 

“Stimulating sessions”? Barney was an ironist. “Stimulating” referred to seduction. But in true Barneyian fashion, there is a double irony here. Natalie was seducing Mamie not from desire but from jealousy. When Natalie read her sonnet, Mamie would have heard her taste, character, and beauty insulted. Why would she have invited Natalie back for more?

Mamie was enjoying a dramatic irony of her own. The sonnet itself tipped Mamie off. She knew she had never been Eva Palmer’s lover, and she knew Eva’s lover had been Lucy. The young woman before her had not the faintest idea what was actually going on. It must have been amusing for Mamie to compare and contrast Eva’s lovers. Besides, making a public show of hosting “stimulating sessions” with Eva’s new girlfriend would effectively put an end to any gossip about Eva and Lucy, who were now together on campus for the first time that we know of since their suspensions. If Mamie Gwinn really did admire Natalie’s poetry, we have found no record that she did anything to promote it.

And if Natalie left the Miss Gwinn sessions in a state of arousal, it was not Renée for whom she was looking. Natalie did not expect Pauline until October 17.

Notes

[1] Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 18192, ff. 88r–106v. See also Francesco Arru, “ ‘Que j’aime ce Dante-là!’: Renée Vivien lectrice et traductrice de Dante,” in Renée Vivien à rebours: Edition pour un centenaire, ed. Nicole Albert (Paris: Orizons, 2009), 77–91.

[2] Elizabeth Cunningham, “Mabel’s Beginnings: Buffalo, New York, 1879–1898,” The Mabel Dodge Luhan House (blog), https://www.mabeldodgeluhan.com/mabels-childhood-home-buffalo-ny/. On Mabel Dodge’s “friendship” with Violet Shillito, see Jane Nelson, Mabel Dodge Luhan (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1982), 28–30, 41. On Pauline’s unrequited love for Violet, see Stroh, afterword to I Remember Her, 96.

[3] Natalie Barney (as Natalie Clifford Barney), Je me souviens…, ed. Suzette Robichon and Félicia Viti (Paris: Gallimard, 2023), 37–46. Translated by Suzanne Stroh as I Remember Her (Sequim, WA: Headmistress, 2025), 6–15.

[4] Pauline Tarn (as Renée Vivien), Je suis tienne irrévocablement: Lettres à Natalie C. Barney, ed. Chantal Bigot and Francesco Rapazzini (Paris: Bartillat, 2023), nos. 1–53 (pp. 24–86).

[5] The Tarns are mentioned in connection with the Barneys in several news clippings: “Bar Harbor,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, 16 September 1900, 8; “Bar Harbor Social Season,” New York Times, 30 Aug. 1900, 7; “Bar Harbor in a Rush,” New York Tribune, 19 Aug. 1900, A6; “Along Mt. Desert: Yachting Regatta and a Horse Show—Mrs. Barney’s Hospital Charity,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 25 Aug. 1900, 13; “The World of Society,” Evening Star, 6 September 1900, 7; “Bar Harbor’s Horse Show,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 26 Aug. 1900, 28.

[6] Pauline Tarn to Jean Charles-Brun, 20 Aug. 1900, in Pauline Tarn (as Renée Vivien), Lettres inédites à Jean Charles-Brun (1900–1909), ed. Nelly Sanchez (Paris: Mauconduit, 2020), no. 6 (pp. 55–56).

[7] Natalie would recall this a few months later in a letter to Eva: “I have so longed for you—I have been so starved without you all these years.” Natalie Barney to Eva Palmer, n.d., NCB C2 2995 (34), fonds Natalie Clifford Barney,  Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

[8] Natalie Barney to Eva Palmer, 29 Apr. 1904, no. NCB36-EP, Eva Palmer Sikelianos Papers, Center for Asia Minor Studies, Athens, Greece. 

[9] Pauline Tarn (“Paul”) to Natalie Barney (“Mon cher Petit”), 25 Sept. 1900, in Je suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 61 (p. 93).

[10] Pauline Tarn (“Paul”) to Natalie Barney, 10 Oct. 1900, in Je suis suis tienne irrévocablement, no. 63 (pp. 95–96).

[11] Town Topics: The Journal of Society 44, no. 8 (Aug. 23, 1900): 7: “Miss Natalie Barney, Miss May Conover, Miss Eleanora Willing and Miss Violet Whelen were particularly graceful. They are planning their Terpischorean accomplishments into some affair for charity, to be given during the Winter in the Quaker City.”

[12] Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets, 66.

[13] Katharine Lürman to Natalie Barney, postmarked 6 Oct. 1900, NCB-C2-2745, fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

[14] Natalie Barney to Eva Palmer, 14 Oct. 1900, NCB-EP C2 2995 6-9/330, fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris.

[15] Paris, Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, fonds Natalie Clifford Barney, in a set of typewritten poems found among Barney’s uncatalogued papers.

[16] Bryn Mawr College Program, Academic Year 1899–1900 (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1899), 4–5.

[17] Natalie Clifford Barney, Souvenirs indiscrets (Paris: Flammarion, 1960), 67.

[18] Modified from the translation in Pious’s notes to Natalie Clifford Barney, Selected Poems, 143.