Renée Vivien: French Poet?

This chapter uses the example of the Anglo-American writer Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn, 1877-1909) to explore what it might mean to claim a lesbian identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. The child of an English father and an American mother who chose France as her primary residence, Vivien embodied a transnational existence. But for those with her class privilege, national boundaries were often flexible, as illustrated by the fact that, while she travelled extensively, Vivien may never have possessed a passport. On the one hand, such an evasion of national belonging may have been liberating, but perhaps at the cost of a sense of shared (sexual communtity) community.