![]() ![]() Natalie Clifford Barney was born in 1876 into a Henry James-esque world of East Coast privilege and social anxiety. Whereas Barney’s writings, for example, are all but forgotten, these fearless studies of strong, self-possessed women enjoy a critical reputation far beyond their significance as curios of early 20th century lesbian life. She died on this day in 1970.īrooks’s reputation has greatly increased in recent years. Towards the end she refused even to see Barney, unable to endure her infidelities any longer. ![]() Later, though, her works were dismissed as postcards from a vanished social circle or, as Truman Capote put it, “the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts”.īrooks all but gave up painting in 1925, and in later life the mid-tones in her own life turned darker and she descended into depression and paranoia. Brooks’s portrait of Troubridge is among her best works, though its subject is reported to have anxiously inquired “am I really like that?”.īrooks’s paintings, with their subdued twilight palette in which grey predominates, found initial success in the years before World War I the psychological insight into her subjects that so troubled Troubridge prompted Robert de Montesquiou to famously call her “the thief of souls”. Brooks was known for her “lesbian Dandy” look, but it stopped short of drag she thought Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge, for example, had taken the whole butch thing a little too far. ![]()
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