Natalie, Book 4: Communion

At 20 rue Jacob, Natalie Clifford Barney is making a world.

Behind the doors of her Paris salon, women gather to write, argue, flirt, perform, provoke, and take themselves seriously as artists. Poets arrive with new work. Painters arrive with opinions. Aristocrats arrive with complicated histories. Lovers sometimes arrive with other lovers.

The conversations are rarely dull.

Natalie has spent her life refusing the idea that a woman must choose between love and freedom. The women around her are not always inclined to make that belief convenient.

Romaine Brooks, with her uncompromising artistic vision, understands independence as something more exacting than a romantic promise. Élisabeth de Gramont brings her own formidable intelligence and understanding of attachment. And as the years change the company at rue Jacob, women including Janine Lahovary enter a life that refuses to settle into any conventional arrangement.

Beyond the salon, literary reputations are made and guarded, often by men with little interest in remembering the women who helped shape their age.

Natalie has other plans.

Here, women will be read. Their art will be taken seriously. Their loves will not require translation into respectable terms.

But creating a sanctuary is one thing. Living honestly among the people who know you best is another.

Communion is a novel of art, intimacy, rivalry, and the extraordinary possibilities of women making a place for themselves in history.