Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
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Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1874-1945) was a French journalist, poet, and novelist. She was a prolific writer who produced more than 70 books.
In France, she is best known for her poem beginning with the line "L'odeur de mon pays était dans une pomme" ("In the smell of an apple I held my native land.")
She was married to the translator J. C. Mardrus from 1900 to 1915, but her primary orientation was toward women. In 1902-03 she wrote a series of love poems to the American writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, published posthumously in 1957 as Nos secrètes amours (Our Secret Loves).[1] She also depicted Barney in her 1930 novel, L'Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts), in which she said she "analyzed and described Natalie at length as well as the life into which she initiated me". The protagonist of the novel is a hermaphrodite named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées. Barney appears as Laurette Wells, a salon hostess who spends much of the novel trying to win back an ex-lover loosely based on Renée Vivien.[2]
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Livia, Anna (1995). "Introduction: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and the Phrenetic Harlequinade." Delarue-Mardrus, Lucie; trans. Anna Livia (1995). The Angel and the Perverts. New York: New York University Press, 1-60. ISBN 0-8147-5098-2.
- Souhami, Diana (2005). Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-34324-8.
