WILD GIRLS: Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks
By Diana Souhami
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99; 356pp
ISBN 0 297 64386 X
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In 1921, a Tory MP proposed the clause “Acts of Gross Indecency by Females”, to be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which proscribed male homosexuality. In the House of Commons he pronounced that lesbianism threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls and induced neurasthenia and insanity. Everyone agreed, and the clause was taken to the House of Lords to be ratified.

It failed. Their lordships decreed that silence was better than information. The Lord Chancellor asserted that of every thousand women, 999 “have never heard a whisper of these practices”. What he called “this noxious and horrible suspicion” must not be imparted.

Seven years later, in 1928, Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness. She was told by the Director of Public Prosecutions: “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this book.”

London was not the best place for lesbians. The ones who lived there either married and kept themselves respectable while pursuing women privately, as did Vita Sackville-West, or they defiantly lived out their difference and became notorious, like Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge.

The story in Paris was very different. The city from the 1920s until the Second World War was a haven for artists and free thinkers. Picasso preferred Paris to Spain, James Joyce preferred it to Ireland. The American Sylvia Beach ran her famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and all the great literary names of Modernism — Eliot, Pound, Hemingway — could be found from time to time visiting the salons and cafés.

Less well known is that Paris of this period provided a haven for women who wanted to live and love differently. Neither before nor since has there been such a coincidence of time and place and desire — and money.

Every rich lesbian in the world seems to have been here — Eva Palmer, heiress to the biscuit fortune. “Jo” Carstairs, who dressed like a French sailor, including tattoos, and who inherited millions from Standard Oil. Winnaretta Singer, from the sewing-machine family. Gertrude Stein and her lover Alice B. Toklas; the painter Romaine Brooks; Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), whose father was the richest man in Britain; and of course Natalie Barney, who became the centre of gay Paris, with her Friday salons at 20 rue Jacob.

Alongside the very rich were those independent women who also found a life in that city — Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood, extravagantly praised by T. S. Eliot. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker correspondent, set up home in Paris with her lover. Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s niece, fuelled her short life of gin and cocaine in Natalie’s bed. The poet Renée Vivien and the French icon and writer Colette, were regulars at the salons. Colette wrote to Natalie: “My door and my arms are always open to you.”

Diana Souhami tells the story of those years with her usual wit and detail. She centres the drama around Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, who met in Paris in 1915, when they were both in their forties, and whose unconventional relationship lasted for more than fifty years. Natalie’s joie de vivre and Romaine’s gothic gloom are the north and south poles of this fascinating world of difference. What Souhami makes clear is that we are not only talking about sexual difference, but about a completely different way of living. The misconception of gayness as a same-gender copy of heterosexuality is far from the truth. For Natalie Barney and most of those around her, loving women was about re-imagining life. Nothing was going to be the same as in the “homelands” of marriage.

Natalie believed that men made laws for their own benefit. Without guilt or doubt she resolved to revise these laws, especially the notion of female fidelity. She loved Romaine for 50 years but she was never faithful in bed.

Looking lovely was important too — not to please men, but to delight other women. “Why resemble our enemies?” she said of the stereotype lesbian of cropped hair and riding breeches.

She was ahead of her time in every way, and Souhami is right to emphasise what an achievement that was, and how difficult it was, even with a vast fortune at her disposal. She was an early model for alternative living, helping other women financially, and refusing to spend too much on possessions.

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