Renée Vivien

Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn in London in 1877 and died in Paris in 1909, was a British-born poet who wrote exclusively in French. A prominent lesbian figure in the Belle Époque literary scene of Paris, she is widely regarded as one of the first notable lesbian poets of the twentieth century, and her work has attracted renewed attention through the revival of interest in Sapphic verse.

She grew up in a wealthy household: her father, British, had built a fortune through property investments, and her mother was American. After her father died in 1886, her mother reportedly tried to have her declared legally insane in order to claim the inheritance, but the attempt failed. Vivien received the money at twenty-one and settled permanently in France, where she took the name Renée Vivien.

Her emotional life was intense and turbulent. She had a relationship with the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney, and she felt guilty about having set aside her childhood friend Violet Shillito, to whom she was devoted without ever consummating the bond; Shillito's death from typhoid fever in 1901 left a lasting mark. She later became involved with Baroness Hélène de Zuylen, with whom she had a discreet affair for several years, and with Kérimé Turkham Pasha, the wife of a Turkish diplomat, whom she knew mainly through a passionate correspondence. Both later relationships ended painfully: in 1907 the baroness left her for another woman, and in 1908 Kérimé ended their clandestine affair.

Her poetry, written in French, belongs to the Parnassian and Symbolist traditions, which she kept alive almost to the end. It includes sonnets, hendecasyllabic verse and prose poems, and much of it is openly autobiographical, dwelling on romantic longing, lost love and despair. She also wrote prose, including the novel A Woman Appeared to Me, which only appeared in English decades later.

The last years were marked by alcohol, drugs, failing health and several suicide attempts. She died in Paris in November 1909, aged thirty-two, probably of pneumonia worsened by addiction and anorexia. She became known as the "Muse of the Violets", and her work has been championed by readers and scholars of lesbian literature, who recognise her as a pioneering voice.