Barney was the youngest of four children and the only one who fully shared her father's cultural interests; as a child she showed talent as a singer and pianist.

While he was away on a three-year expedition in Africa (he named the boat in which he circled Lake Victoria The Lady Alice), she instead married Albert Clifford Barney, son of a wealthy manufacturer of railway cars in Dayton, Ohio.

[4] In 1882 Barney and her family spent the summer at New York City's Long Beach Hotel, where Oscar Wilde happened to be speaking on his American lecture tour.

[7] In 1887 she travelled to Paris to be nearer her two daughters while they attended Les Ruches, a French boarding school founded by the feminist educator Marie Souvestre.

She returned to Paris in 1896 – bringing her daughter Laura to a French hospital for treatment of leg pain from a childhood injury – and resumed her study with Carolus-Duran as well as taking lessons from the Spanish painter Claudio Castelucho.

[9] When Natalie wrote a chapbook of French poetry, Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes (Some Portrait-Sonnets of Women), Barney was pleased to provide illustrations.

Albert, alerted to the book's theme by a newspaper review headlined "Sappho Sings in Washington", rushed to Paris, where he bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and printing plates and insisted that Barney and Natalie return with him to the family's summer home in Bar Harbor, Maine.