Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, And Art, the Lives And Loves of Natalie Barney And Romaine Brooks - Softcover

Souhami, Diana

3.7

321 ratings by Goodreads

9780312366605: Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, And Art, the Lives And Loves of Natalie Barney And Romaine Brooks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312366604 ISBN 13: 9780312366605

Publisher: Griffin, 2007

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A dual portrait of the poet and artist couple sets their lesbian relationship against a cultural backdrop of 1920s and 1930s Paris, describing Romaine's unhappy childhood, the patronage of Natalie's salon by several famous figures, and their fifty-year romance that endured in spite of numerous challenges. By the author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

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Review:

Diana Souhami describes the whole complex relationship well, particularly the poignancy of the final years in the lives of her two Wild Girls.... Pages are crammed with descriptions of exotic characters, their extravagances and eccentricities, the lillies, the pearls, the velvet-lined rooms... (SELINA HASTINGS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

Far more intriguing is something that lies outside this story altogether. At the start of each chapter is placed a short passage in itallics, never more than a paragraph or two. Here the author seems to be narrating some of her personal lesbian experiences.... These are fascinating and I sincerely hope Ms Souhami will expand them and produce her own memoir of life as a wild girl. (SELINA HASTINGS SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

Diana Souhami's cunning insertion of occasional vignettes from her own, rather less opulent existence as a modern gay woman enhances our awareness that this book is as much a tribute to lesbian fulfilment as a straightforward chronicle of its subjects' lives. Her skill, not just in garnering detail, but in finding the perfect place for, is unrivalled� (Jonathan Keates LITERARY REVIEW)

Natalie's salon and Romaine's paintings may be no more than cultural footnotes, but their love, in all its tortured resistless grandeur, deserves a kind of immortality. (Jonathan Keates LITERARY REVIEW)

Diana Souhami, in writing about a book about them and the significant others in each of their lives has produced a series of miniatures that add up to a group portrait of a singular society that flourished in Paris (and as Souhami points out, would have been impossible anywhere else) during the first third of the 20th century... an exceptionally witty and original biographer. (SUNDAY TIMES)

Diana Souhami tells the story of those years with her usual wit and detail... what Souhami makes clear is that we are not only talking about sexual difference but about a completely different way of living. (JEANETTE WINTERSON THE TIMES)

"Wild Girls is a wonderful evocation of an era and of a relationship frightening in both its intensity and its bleakness. It is interspersed with tales of Souhami's own life in London bars or cafes... This gives fuel to the contention that all biography is covert autobiography: we seize and dwell on those elements of our subject's life that illuminate our own." (JAD ADAMS GUARDIAN)

Book Description:

A defining biography of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks - pivotal figures in the cultural life of Paris in the 1920s and 30s, by the award-winning, bestselling author of 'Selkirk's Island'..

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