Wild Girls by Diana Souhami

Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks were both rich, American and grandly lesbian. They met in Paris in 1915 and their relationship lasted more than fifty years, despite infidelity, separation and temperamental differences.

Natalie believed that living was 'the first of all the arts'. She published memoirs and collections of poems and aphorisms, but her passion and drive was for seduction and love. She liked lavish display, lots of sex, and love unbounded by rules. At her Friday afternoon salons, in the Grecian Temple of Friendship in the garden of her Paris home, 'one met lesbians'. Lovers and friends circled the Amazone as she was called. She aspired to make her Temple the Sapphic centre of the western world.

Romaine's prime interest, on the other hand, was herself and her painting. She produced many self-portraits and portraits of her own and Natalie's lovers and friends. She endured an unhappy childhood and a fraught relationship with her mother, and trusted no one but Natalie.

Natalie and Romaine are at the centre of this 'Sapphic Idyll'. Included, too, are their lovers and friends before and after they met: Liane de Pougy, the exquisite courtesan and lover of princes; Renee Vivien, poet of melancholy and death, who died of anorexia aged thirty-two; Dolly Wilde, niece of Oscar, who ran up huge bills and died of a drugs overdose; the prima ballerina, Ida Rubinstein; the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio - and many others. Natalie's salon, attended by Gertrude Stein, Colette and Edith Sitwell, was a magnet for introductions and cultural innovation. Drawing from letters, papers and paintings, Diana Souhami recreates the lives and loves of this pair of dazzling and wild women.