Epilogue
The Three Sapphos never reunited as a group. Pauline moved out, and Natalie gave up the lease on their house in Neuilly.
Olga Nethersole, the original “Sapho 1900” sensation, quit the stage to become a surgical nurse in World War One. Her last performance was the third act of Sapho in 1913.[1]
Liane de Pougy, the Belle Époque diva, carried on being a fashion plate. She married a Romanian prince so that she could “give up that business of the bed.” She and Natalie got back together again, briefly, in the 1920s. But Liane dumped her—again.[2] Liane’s memoir, My Blue Notebooks (Mes cahiers bleus), became another lesbian classic.[3]
Eva moved to Paris in 1902 and lived around the corner from Natalie.[4] Foremothers of polyamory, they kept looking for ways to make a life together. Their performances in Natalie’s garden drew the likes of Colette, Mata Hari, and Isadora Duncan, making them all famous until Eva abandoned Natalie for Greece in 1906.
Natalie never stopped trying to win Pauline back. In 1904, they ran off together to start a new school of sapphic poets on Lesvós. It didn’t work out. They broke up again.
Natalie and her mother repaired their relationship within a matter of months. They even started writing plays together. As for Natalie’s abusive father, it was a relief to all when he bit the dust. Natalie and her sister inherited more money than they could spend in a lifetime. Natalie used her fortune to encourage women in the arts.
Pauline did indeed achieve greatness as a poet and translator. In the nine years before her early death in 1909, she wrote at an extraordinary rate. Apart from the works of “Paule Riversdale” and other possible collaborations with Hélène, Pauline published an average of over two books a year.[5]
Natalie Barney lived a very long life. She published twelve books during her lifetime, though much of her work remains unpublished. She hosted a literary salon that became the most vital center of French and American culture on either side of the Atlantic from the Roaring Twenties until after the Second World War.
Eva, for her part, never published. Instead, she made herself the living embodiment of ancient Greek learning, arts, and crafts, working to bring about a cultural revival in Greece.[6]
Eva’s flame for Lucy never died. When Lucy Donnelly retired from teaching in 1936, she was presented with a scrapbook of tributes from former students and colleagues—and a love letter from Eva.[7]
Lucy, Helen, and Mamie remained friends all their lives. After Mamie ran off with Alfred Hodder, Lucy rose through the ranks to become head of the English Department at Bryn Mawr College.[8] Lucy’s letters to Mamie are full of gratitude through the 1930s.
Helen Thomas left Bryn Mawr in 1903 to marry Simon Flexner, the new director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Of her sister’s engagement to a Jewish doctor, the antisemitic Carey Thomas wrote to Mary Garrett: “It is a blow, I confess, but I shall have to make the best of it for Helen’s sake.”[9]
After the Hodder scandal, Gwinn was out and Garrett was in. Thomas continued to rule Bryn Mawr with an iron fist, remaining a life trustee and a director even after her retirement.
The Bryn Mawr SGA lost its power struggle with President Thomas. On February 25, 1902, the trustees voted that the student government’s role was merely advisory, while the power to actually mete out retribution lay with the president.[10]
If not for the Eva Palmer scandal, the Hodder scandal might never have come to a head. Without the Hodder scandal, Gertrude Stein would never have written Fernhurst. Stein’s account was based on second- and third-hand gossip, but one thing was clear: with the Bryn Mawr SGA stripped of its power and independence, President Thomas had emerged as the undisputed leader of one of the foremost women’s colleges in the nation. For better and for worse, she shaped a generation of women who went on to become leaders themselves.
But Bryn Mawr was not to be a leading center of lesbian culture. Bryn Mawr teaches us that for quantum leaps to happen in queer culture, the older generations must concede their power to the new. At Bryn Mawr, on the verge of the modernist explosion, two pioneering generations of American sapphics proved unable to overcome their differences. In spite of so many shared qualities (lesbian identity, polyamory, creative drive), the older generation (Thomas, Gwinn, de Wolfe) was too deeply invested in securing its own power and influence to mentor the rising generation (Donnelly, Palmer, Barney). When the younger generation was betrayed, it made a clean break.
The Eva Palmer scandal of 1897–1898 places this break even before the pioneering works of Gertrude Stein, who did not turn her back on Johns Hopkins University (indeed, on America) until 1903.
If Eva Palmer, Natalie Barney, and Pauline Tarn had ever thought that women’s educational institutions would nurture their ambitions, they abandoned that idea. They would never embrace the American academy again. “Sapho 1900” made her home on the other side of the Atlantic, in Paris.
Even today, The Three Sapphos have a devoted fan base. They are memorialized in fictional works such as: Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho; Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (The Passion According to Renée Vivien, available in English and recently translated into French, Pauline Tarn’s adopted tongue, by Nicole Albert); and Memory Rehearsal, by Eleni Sikelianos, great-granddaughter of Eva Palmer and a leading poet in her own right.
Notes
[1] “Olga Nethersole Dies at Age of 80,” New York Times, 11 Jan. 1951, 25, https://www.nytimes.com/1951/01/11/archives/olga-nethersole-dies-at-age-of-80-famed-british-actress-whose-role.html.
[2] The brief renewal of Natalie and Liane’s relationship is recounted in Natalie Barney (as Natalie Clifford Barney), Amants féminins ou la troisième, ed. Chelsea Ray and Yvan Quintin (Paris: ErosOnyx, 2013), translated by Chelsea Ray as Women Lovers or the Third Woman (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2016).
[3] Liane de Pougy, Mes cahiers bleus (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1977).
[4] Barney’s address was 25 rue de Bois de Boulogne; Eva’s, 56 rue de Longchamp.
[5] This includes revised editions, which were labor-intensive.
[6] Leontis, Eva Palmer Sikelianos, esp. Introduction and chap. 5. Eva also brought Greece to Bryn Mawr. In 1935, she produced a Greek play, Euripides’ Bacchai, at the college. Gossip still swirled. See “Bacchae (1935),” APGRD, Oxford University, https://apgrd.ox.ac.uk/productions/production/5505; Huldah Cheek Sharp, “The Heroine of Delphi: A paper for the Query Club of Nashville, May 1982” (typescript), in Eva Palmer’s alumna file, Bryn Mawr College Archives.
[7] Eva’s letter begins: “Belovèd Lucy, / Not to be with you today is a real trial. However much I may visualize, as I do very keenly, the beauty of your natural and also wonderfully acquired poise, however vividly I may imgine the absorption of your listeners in the words that will seem simple and easy only to those who do not know the enormous balanced wisdom which lies back of your kind of ease and simplicity; however truly I may feel the currents of gratitude and admiration and devotion that are surging around you today, — the loss of not being with you is none the less great.” In her letter, Eva presented two wholly inadequate excuses for missing the retirement party: an art exhibit in New York and a theatrical proposal that had only just been accepted. But Philadelphia was only a train ride away. At the time, Lucy was living with her “intimate friend” Edith Finch (later Russell) in the nearby town of Rosemont. Perhaps it was on Edith’s account that Eva could not bring herself to celebrate Lucy’s retirement in person. On Lucy’s relationship with Edith, see Elisa Rolle, “Queer Places: Bryn Mawr College,” https://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/klmno/Lucy%20Donnelly.html; Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, 462. Among the other tributes in the scrapbook were those of Seven Sisters presidents Helen Taft Manning, William Allan Neilson, and Millicent McIntosh; the art historian Bernard Berenson, philosopher Bertrand Russell, poet Marianne Moore, medievalist Emily Hope Allen, and actor Theresa Helburn; and Chinese students such as Fung Kei Liu, Vaung Tsien Bang Chou, and Ting (full name unknown).
[8] Lucy was also the founder of Bryn Mawr’s Chinese Scholarship Committee, which provided funding for Chinese students to attend Bryn Mawr. The details of Lucy’s career can be found in her alumna file, which is held in the Bryn Mawr College Archives: President [Katharine Elizabeth] McBride and Judge Learned Hand, Memorial Service for Lucy Martin Donnelly, 1870–1948; “Lucy M. Donnelly Dies at Age of 77,” Philadelphia Inquirer, [4 Aug. 1948]; “Lucy Donnelly, Educator, Dies,” Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), n.d. [1948]. More on the Chinese Scholarship Committee can be found at “Japanese and Chinese Scholarships,” Who Built Bryn Mawr?, 2023, https://wbbm.digitalprojects.brynmawr.edu/current/disoriented/japanese-chinese-scholarships. The committee records are held in the college archives (BMC-RG12-FC).
[9] Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, 364.
[10] Bryn Mawr Trustee Minutes, 51–52, Bryn Mawr College Archives.