Renée Vivien

“Renée Vivien” (Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877-1909) was introduced into Symbolist circles by one of her lovers, Natalie Barney, but produced the bulk of her work while in a relationship with Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt, with whom she collaborated on a number of books under the pseudonym Paule Riversdale. Under her usual pseudonym she published two volumes of prose poems and two further volumes of prose as well as the numerous volumes of poetry that helped to make her notorious as a kind of tragic symbolic embodiment of the Belle Époque: a neurotic, anorexic, alcoholic, suicidal lesbian doomed to self-destruction.