Faustina and Other Stories

“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.

Hélène de Zuylen de Nyevelt (1863-1947) was the version of her name used on her published work by Baroness Héléne van Zulyen van Nijevet de Haar, née de Rothschild (in the famous banking family). Her early literary work, written in collaboration with Renée Vivien, was published under the pseudonym Paul Riversadale, but she went on to produce poetry, short stories, novels and plays under her own name, all of it heavily influenced by Vivien, including the items she published after the latter’s death, scrupulously echoing the younger writer’s Decadent and Symbolist leanings.