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Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 848.91209
EAN: 9780312343248
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 0312343248
Label: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: November 05, 2005
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: October 13, 2005
Studio: St. Martin's Press
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Editorial Review:
Natalie and Romaine met in London during World War I and their partnership lasted until Natalie died 52 years later. They were both American expatriates; unconventional, energetic, flamboyant and rich.
Natalie was known as the wild girl of Cincinnatti. She had numerous affairs with other women: Renée Vivien who nailed shut the windows of her apartment, wrote about the loveliness of death, drank eau de cologne and died of anorexia aged 30; and Dolly Wilde niece of Oscar, who ran up terrible phone bills and died of a drugs overdose. She wrote books of aphorism, memoirs and poems and her Friday afternoon salons in the cobbled garden of her Parisian house were for introductions and culture. They were frequented by Gertrude Stein, Colette, Radclyffe Hall and Edith Sitwell.
Romaine achieved fame in her own lifetime and after as an artist. She painted her lovers including Gabriele dAnnunzio with whom she had a terrible and tortured relationship, and the ballerina Ida Rubinstein. However her relationship with Natalie was constant and in their eventful years together they threw up a liberating spirit of culture, style and candour.
Diana Souhami has written a fascinating portrait of these two enigmatic figures, as well as a moving portrait of a forgotten time.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Fascinating, But...
A fascinating story of two extraordinary lives soaked in the demi-monde at the fin-de-siecle with the world of the rich and artistic as its background. Unfortunately, this telling comes with some irritating costs. The book is studded with bizarrely extraneous footnotes: does any reader of this story really need to be told who Dante, Proust, Cocteau, Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt (among many others) were? Also, the author interpolates little autobiographical asides that have nothing to do ... Read More
Rating:  - A life still left in shadow
Gray is a difficult colour to master. It is enigmatic, aloof. It can be warm, with tints of peach and pink, or cold, with tints of sapphire and indigo. But no one could ever doubt that American artist Romaine Brooks was a master of gray. From her mysterious, icy portraits of members of the belle époque and the jazz age, to her preference for colorless fashions and décor, to the melancholy of her own day to day existence, Brooks was almost the personification of the colour gray itself. It would take ... Read More
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