About Renée Vivien
Renée Vivien was a British poet who wrote in the French language. A high-profile lesbian writer in Paris during the Belle Époque era, she is widely considered to be one of the first noteworthy lesbian poets of the twentieth century. Her work has recently received more attention due to a revival of interest in Sapphic verse. Many of her poems are autobiographical, pertaining mostly to Baudelarian themes of extreme romanticism and frequent despair. Apart from poetry, she wrote several works of prose, including L'Etre Double, and an unfinished biography of Anne Boleyn, which was published posthumously. She has also been the subject of multiple biographies, most notably those by Jean-Paul Goujon, André Germain, and Yves-Gerard Le Dantec. A novel based on her life was written by the Catalan poet Maria Mercè Marçal in 1994, and translated into English in 2020 as The Passion according to Renée Vivien. Pauline attended the Belsize College in Hampstead, London, where, in 1883, she was awarded a silver medal by the Alliance française for her study of French. She published her first collection of poetry, Études et préludes, in 1901. In 1902, Vivien became romantically involved with the wealthy Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, one of the Paris Rothschilds.
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