Barney hosted a salon at her home at 20-22 rue Jacob in the 6th arrondissement of Paris for more than 60 years, bringing together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French, American, and British literature.

[10] She and her younger sister Laura attended Les Ruches, a French boarding school in Fontainebleau, France, founded by feminist Marie Souvestre.

[12] When she was ten, her family moved from Ohio to the Sheridan Circle area of Washington D.C., spending summers at their large cottage in Bar Harbor, Maine.

[30] Barney herself contributed a chapter to Idylle Saphique in which she described reclining at de Pougy's feet in a screened box at the theater, watching Sarah Bernhardt's play Hamlet.

[40] In 1904 she wrote Je Me Souviens (I Remember), an intensely personal prose poem about their relationship which was presented as a single handwritten copy to Vivien in an attempt to win her back.

"[45] In 1949, two years after the death of Hélène van Zuylen, Barney restored the Renée Vivien Prize[46][47][48][49] with a financial grant[50] under the authority of the Société des gens de lettres and took on the chairmanship of the jury in 1950.

[58] However, a headline in a society gossip paper cried out "Sappho Sings in Washington" and this alerted her father, who bought and destroyed the publisher's remaining stock and printing plates.

In this new location, the salon grew a more prim outward face, with poetry readings and conversation, perhaps because Barney had been told the pavilion's floors would not hold up to large dancing parties.

Other visitors to the salon during the war included Oscar Milosz, Auguste Rodin and poet Alan Seeger, who came while on leave from the French Foreign Legion.

Honorees included Colette, Gertrude Stein, Anna Wickham, Rachilde, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and posthumously, Renée Vivien.

[88] Other visitors to the salon during the 1920s included French writers Jeanne Galzy,[89] André Gide, Anatole France, Max Jacob, Louis Aragon and Jean Cocteau.

[91] For her 1929 book Aventures de l'Esprit (Adventures of the Mind) Barney drew a social diagram which crowded the names of over a hundred people who had attended the salon into a rough map of the house, garden and Temple of Friendship.

Marcel Proust never attended a Friday but did come once to talk with Barney about lesbian culture whilst doing research for In Search of Lost Time, though he ended up too nervous to bring up the subject.

[96] Barney's pensées, like de Sablé's own Maximes, were short, often one-line epigrams or bon mots such as "There are more evil ears than bad mouths" and "To be married is to be neither alone nor together.

[104] She also covered topics such as alcohol, friendship, old age, and literature, writing "Novels are longer than life"[105] and "Romanticism is a childhood ailment; those who had it young are the most robust.

As early as 1901, in Cinq Petits Dialogues Grecs, she argued in favor of multiple relationships and against jealousy;[109] in Éparpillements she wrote "One is unfaithful to those one loves in order that their charm does not become mere habit".

[111] Due in part to Jean Chalon's early biography of her, published in English as Portrait of a Seductress, Barney had become more widely known for her many relationships than for her writing or her salon.

A descendant of Henry IV of France, she had grown up among the aristocracy; when she was a child, according to Janet Flanner, "peasants on her farm ... begged her not to clean her shoes before entering their houses".

[145] Barney herself had Jewish heritage,[146] and since she spent the war in Florence with Brooks, was investigated by Italian authorities because of this; she was able to escape their attention after her sister Laura arranged for a notarized document attesting to her confirmation.

Truman Capote was an intermittent guest for almost ten years; he described the decor as "totally turn-of-the-century" and remembered that Barney introduced him to the models for several characters in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

Renée Vivien wrote many poems about her, as well as a Symbolist novel, Une femme m'apparut (A Woman Appeared to Me, 1904), in which Barney is described as having "eyes ... as sharp and blue as a blade ...

Barney appears in Hall's The Well of Loneliness as the salon hostess Valérie Seymour, a symbol of self-acceptance in contrast with the protagonist's self hatred.

"[165] According to Lillian Faderman, "There was probably no lesbian in the four decades between 1928 and the late 1960s capable of reading English or any of the eleven languages into which the book was translated who was unfamiliar with The Well of Loneliness.

"[166] Lucie Delarue-Mardrus wrote love poems to Barney in the early years of the century, and in 1930 depicted her in a novel, L'Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts), in which she said she "analyzed and described Natalie at length as well as the life into which she initiated me".

The protagonist of the novel is a hermaphrodite named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées.

Marion tells Wells that she is "perverse ... dissolute, self-centered, unfair, stubborn, sometimes miserly ... [but] a genuine rebel, ever ready to incite others to rebellion .... [Y]ou are capable of loving someone just as they are, even a thief—in that lies your only fidelity.

"[168] After meeting Barney in the 1930s, the Russian poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva addressed her in a Letter to the Amazon (1934) in which she expressed her conflicted feelings about love between women.

[170] "[A] Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty";[171] she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood.

Also appearing pseudonymously are de Gramont, Brooks, Dolly Wilde, Hall and her partner Una, Lady Troubridge, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, and Mina Loy.

[172] The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barney herself loved the book and reread it throughout her life.