VIVIEN, Renée. Le Vent des vaisseaux.

VIVIEN, Renée. Le Vent des vaisseaux.'Sapho 1900' at Sea VIVIEN, Rene. Le Vent des vaisseaux. Paris: E. Sansot & Cie. 1910. 8vo. Publishers illustrated wrappers; pp. 103, [1]; upper hinge cracked (textblock partly coming away from spine), short split to upper joint, small chip to head of spine; otherwise a very good copy, uncut and unopened. First edition of this collection of twenty four Symbolist poems by the London born lesbian poet Rene Vivien, published the year after her death at

'Sapho 1900' at Sea

VIVIEN, Renée. Le Vent des vaisseaux. Paris: E. Sansot & Cie. 1910.

8vo. Publisher’s illustrated wrappers; pp. 103, [1]; upper hinge cracked (textblock partly coming away from spine), short split to upper joint, small chip to head of spine; otherwise a very good copy, uncut and unopened.

First edition of this collection of twenty-four Symbolist poems by the London-born lesbian poet Renée Vivien, published the year after her death at the age of thirty-two.

Vivien (born Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877–1909) studied Greek for the express purpose of reading fragments of Sappho’s poetry in the original, and in 1903 published Sapho, the first explicitly queer translation of Sappho, earning herself the nickname ‘Sapho 1900’. She and her on-and-off lover, the American heiress Natalie Barney (who, similarly inspired by Sappho, began writing love poetry to women as early as 1900) spent time in Lesbos in 1904, where they discussed the prospect of a Sapphic school of poetry for women; by 1908, Vivien’s health had declined: she drank heavily and ate almost nothing. She died in 1909, a year after her attempted suicide attempt by means of overdosing on laudanum.

This is the second of her three posthumous collections of verse, along with Haillons and Dans un coin de violettes, also published in 1910. Here, she writes about the beauty of nature, the search for identity, solitude, and love between women, incorporating elements of ethereal landscapes and of Greek myth. In ‘Aveu dans le silence’, for example, she describes the ‘jalousie extreme’ which prevents her from expressing her love for a woman for whom Vivien ‘lives only for the light in her hair’, the soft ‘rays of her smile’, and her ‘miraculous’ green-grey eyes (pp. 70–71, trans.). There was also a de luxe large-paper edition of fifty numbered copies on Japon Impérial, in a variant binding.

We find ten copies in the US (Cornell, Harvard, Indiana, NYPL, Princeton, UC Davis, UCLA, Umass Boston, Wisconsin, Yale) and none in the UK; this edition not on Library Hub.

SKU: 2125439