By Elodie Barnes | On April 30, 2021 | Updated October 2, 2025 | Comments (0)
Isabelle Eberhardt (February 17, 1877 – October 21, 1904) was a Swiss-born traveler and writer. From an early age she dreamed of escaping to North Africa, a dream that was nourished by the exotic fantasies of desert life that were popular at the time.
In her early twenties, she left Europe to make Algeria her home.
Her exploration of the deserts and cities of the Mahgreb, usually disguised as a man, has become legendary. She was a prolific writer, but much of her work — including travelogues, diaries, and short stories — was only published after her death in a freak accident at the age of twenty-seven. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On November 13, 2020 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (8)
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, both Americans, met on September 8, 1907 as new expats in Paris. The two bonded immediately. They remained lifelong partners until Stein’s death, with Alice serving as the doting wife, and later, keeper of her legacy.
“I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken…The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead.”
This is the meeting of Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946) and Alice B. Toklas (1877 – 1967) as written in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). It is Gertrude’s writing, Alice’s voice, and their meeting — twenty-five years previously — recounted as both of them wished to remember it. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On June 22, 2020 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Sylvia Townsend Warner (December 6, 1893 – May 1, 1978) was an English novelist, poet, and musicologist. Best known for her novels Lolly Willowes and The Corner That Held Them, she was also a prolific writer of short stories and contributed to The New Yorker for over forty years.
Despite a revival of her work in the 1970s, led by feminist publisher Virago Press, she is still an under-appreciated figure in literature and is probably just as well known for her long-term relationship with Valentine Ackland. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On May 9, 2020 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (5)
The relationship of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West has earned a place in literary history, and continues to fascinate with its allure of the unconventional, bohemian, and charmingly eccentric.
On December 15, 1922, Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that she had met “the lovely aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste … all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.”
She was, of course, writing of Vita, the woman who would go on to become her lover, friend, and confidante. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On November 17, 2019 | Updated September 29, 2025 | Comments (0)
Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American-born poet, novelist, translator, and essayist who wrote under the pen name H.D.
She was profoundly influenced by the effects of World War I, and the subsequent trends of modernism, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Her work is often framed within the context of other important modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. Today, she’s best remembered for her innovation and experimental approach to poetry. Read More→
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