HOWZAT

Her neighbours were not always as accommodating of her endless stream of women as she was, especially when they dressed as wood nymphs or danced naked in her garden. Her response? “What do I care if they vilify me or judge me according to their prejudices?” This is a strong statement when the overriding view of lesbianism was either criminal perversity or the sexual psychopathy of Havelock Ellis’s famous “invert” definition. While Radclyffe Hall was begging for the right to her existence, Natalie was throwing parties until dawn. That her “problem” might really be nothing more than another’s “prejudice” is a very modern view indeed.

Romaine Brooks was as tortured as Natalie was tolerant. Natalie let in all life while Romaine did her best to shut it out, confusing the solitary temperament necessary to the artist with a frightened misanthropy. Romaine was battle-scarred by her family and never recovered. “My mother stands between me and life,” she said.

Romaine is probably the most talented of all the women of that period, alongside Colette and Gertrude Stein. She had a strong signature style, and her portraits of women are neither pretty nor provocative. The sombre greys and browns she favoured give a seriousness to her subjects often denied to women whether as society portraits, nudes, or paid sitters for the male gaze.

Her women look out with questions in their eyes — they are our interrogators as much as we are theirs.

Romaine could never settle anywhere for long. As soon as she had made a studio perfect, she would leave it behind. Natalie longed for them to live together, Romaine always refused — except for the six years of the war, when Natalie had to leave Paris, and lived with Romaine on her farm outside Florence.

The war destroyed life in Paris for Natalie and her friends. The golden years were done, and the postwar austerity and poverty that opened the modern era were not accepting of bold experiments in living. It was hard enough to get by at all.

When Natalie died in 1972, a new wave of feminism was just beginning, but it is unlikely that Natalie would have recognised it as the way forward — she never wanted a share of the male world, she wanted to change it entirely.

I have a novel written by Natalie Barney, The One Who is Legion, inscribed in her hand, July 1936: “To my angel Romaine, illustrated by the two pictures of hers, which more clearly than my words, define this (and our) doublebeing!” Diana Souhami has traced these lives of “double-being”, and given us a double biography — the two lives of her subjects, and the two worlds living side by side in Paris, the one so well known, and the other a tantalising possibility of difference, a virtual world, made real for a time, and disappearing like so much else, under the brutality of war.

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