Every Friday, for half a decade beginning in 1909, whenever she was in Paris, Natalie Clifford Barney hosted the one of the most brilliant international salons of its day. Barney received in her home such literary, artistic, musical and intellectual beacons of the 20th century as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Isadora Duncan, Auguste Rodin, Romaine Brooks, William Carlos Williams, Paul Valery, Renee Vivian, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Truman Capote. In 1929, she shared her life, in and out of the salon, through the publication of the first of three volumes of reminiscences. Here Barney explores her family tree, chronicles her friendships and associations through reprinted correspondence and recreated conversations, and evokes the golden age of her salon in a gallery of literary portraits. The first half of the volume features a baker's dozen of the male writers she kneow, from Oscar Wilde, whom she literally ran into at the age of five, to Pierre Louys, who encouraged her fledgling writing career and Paul Valery, an "Immortal" in the Academie Francaise. Barney dedicated the latter half of her diary to the Academie des Femmes, which she founded in 1927, as a counterpart to the male bastion of the French Academy. The book preserves the proceedings of meetings between such figures as Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy, in the distinctive voices of their speakers.

This long-lost novel recounts a passionate triangle of love and loss among three of the most daring women of belle epoque Paris. In this barely disguised roman a clef, the legendary American heiress, writer, and arts patron Natalie Clifford Barney becomes the character N., the dashing Italian baroness Mimi Franchetti is M., and the beautiful French courtesan Liane de Pougy is L. Barney writes of an erotic liaison that breaks all taboos but also reveals N.'s vulnerability as she unexpectedly becomes the devastated "third woman." The story ends with a powerful dialogue on the challenges of love. Never before published in English, and only recently published in French, this modernist, experimental work has been brought to light by Chelsea Ray's research. It reveals a more complex Natalie Barney and expands modernist literary representations of lesbian love. Ray's translation is augmented by her essay and notes highlighting themes of modernism and queer studies, as well as by Melanie Hawthorne's introduction.