Women Lovers, or The Third Woman by Natalie Clifford Barney

Is too easy to forget that she has been dead - and deader still for being unnoticed - these sixty years. (as she called the sexual adventures which she applied like unguent to her emotional wounds), for fast cars and foreign films, for experimental literature and alcoholic actresses, are still right up to the minute, and it Her tastes for cutting-edge conversation and `emergency seductions' like someone one had become familiar with by reading, rather than by knowing' - too literary, in short, to be believed.Īlthough she could only have been produced by the follies and grandeurs of the 1920s and the 1930s, Dolly Wilde seems sensationally contemporary. The Baron de Meyer, adored by the Sitwells, the Cunards, and French Academicians such as Edmond Jaloux, attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, Dolly Wilde was almost, as her friend Janet Flanner wrote, In titled, artistic,Īnd carefully closeted circles in Paris and London and Hollywood, stories of the outrageous things Dorothy Ierne Wilde said and did were passed around like canapés at a book launch. With a distinctly contemporary gaze conscious of the camera, casual about her audience.įor sixty years she was a delicious rumour: Oscar Wilde's enchanting niece Dorothy, born in 1895, a scant three months after her uncle's notorious trials and shameful imprisonment. She stares out at us from her few significant photographs Herself: a beautiful, dreamy-eyed, paradoxical woman - wonderfully stylish and intermittently unkempt, spiritually illuminated and clearly mondaine. Ratty fur coat (perhaps it was Oscar's favourite coat after all, the one Dolly's father Willie was supposed to have pawned when Oscar was imprisoned), she looked most like Oscar Wilde when she was dressed up as And although she would occasionally dress up as her uncle in borrowed, too-tight pants, a great flowing tie and a famously

She spoke remarkably like her uncle too or, rather, like a brilliantlyįemale version of Oscar - for there was nothing parodically male about Dolly Wilde. Insisted was always the natural accompaniment of wit. She had the same artfully posed, soft, white hands, the same elongated face, and the same air of indolent melancholy which Aristotle She looked, said everyone who knew them both, remarkably like her uncle Oscar.

Virtue with an object is so much more salutary than virtue How long I shall keep in the path of virtue I can't say but Iridescent tail in a hundred pleasant pools!. I am a darting trout shifting, glancing & flashing my The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece

Women Lovers, or The Third Woman by Natalie Clifford Barney