VIVIEN, Renée.

£975 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Brumes de Fjords. First edition, with the author's inscribed calling card and engraved vignette portrait affixed to the half-title. The poems use nature and Scandinavian landscapes to explore female desire and identity. "Several reflect Vivien's sense of feeling torn by different loves but ultimately wishing to follow the 'pure' life of a poet" (Jay, p. 16).The calling card is inscribed "avec les compliments de".Nicknamed "Sappho 1900", Vivien (1877-1909) was a high-profile lesbian of the Parisian Belle Époque. She published the first "explicitly lesbian translation of Sappho's poetry" (Mendès-Leite, p. 102) and in 1904 attempted to establish a women's school of poetry on Lesbos with her lover, the writer Natalie Clifford Barney.

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