Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (3 November 1874 in

Honfleur Honfleur () is a commune in the Calvados department in northwestern France. It is located on the southern bank of the estuary of the Seine across from le Havre and very close to the exit of the Pont de Normandie. The people that inhabit Honfl ...

– 26 April 1945 ) was a French

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspi ...

sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

, historian and designer. She was a prolific writer, who produced more than 70 books in her lifetime. In France, she is best known for her poem beginning with the line "L'odeur de mon pays était dans une pomme" ("In an apple I held the smell of my native land.") Her writings express her love of travel and her love for her native

Normandy Normandy (; french: link=no, Normandie ; nrf, Normaundie, Nouormandie ; from Old French , plural of ''Normant'', originally from the word for "northman" in several Scandinavian languages) is a geographical and cultural region in Northwestern ...

. ''L'Ex-voto'' (1932), for example, describes the life and milieu of the fishermen of Honfleur on the eve of the twentieth century. She was married to the translator J. C. Mardrus from 1900 to 1915, but her primary sexual orientation was toward women. She was involved with several women throughout her lifetime, and she wrote extensively of lesbian love. In 1902-03 she wrote a series of love poems to the American writer and salon hostess

Natalie Clifford Barney Natalie Clifford Barney (October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972) was an American writer who hosted a salon (gathering), literary salon at her home in Paris that brought together French and international writers. She influenced other authors throu ...

, published posthumously in 1957 as ''Nos secrètes amours'' (''Our Secret Loves''). She also depicted Barney in her 1930 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 A protagonist () is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles. If a st ...

of the novel is a

hermaphrodite In reproductive biology, a hermaphrodite () is an organism that has both kinds of reproductive organs and can produce both gametes associated with male and female sexes. Many taxonomic groups of animals (mostly invertebrates) do not have s ...

named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées. Barney appears as "Laurette Wells", a salon hostess who spends much of the novel trying to win back an ex-lover, loosely based on Barney's real-life attempts at regaining her relationship with her former lover, Renée Vivien. She was awarded the first Renée Vivien prize for women poets in 1936. One admirer wrote to describe Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, stating in part; "She is adorable. She sculpts, mounts to horse, loves a woman, then another, and yet another. She was able to free herself from her husband and has never embarked on a second marriage or the conquest of another man."

Notes

References

* Livia, Anna(1995). "Introduction: Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and the Phrenetic Harlequinade." *
Lucie Delarue-Mardus
1874 births 1945 deaths French women novelists French lesbian writers People from Honfleur French LGBT novelists French LGBT poets 20th-century French poets French women poets 20th-century French novelists 20th-century French women writers {{France-poet-stub