ABSTRACT
In 1973, experimental novelist Bertha Harris published a love letter to the many experimental writers in Natalie Barney’s coterie. Harris bragged of stalking Djuna Barnes on her daily walk and stuffing her mailbox full of flowers, all part of an attempt to create a usable past for her radical feminist present. Harris’s devotion was extreme but not unique; the women expatriates of Paris were an important source of inspiration to Harris and her posse, which included Jill Johnston, Esther Newman, and Louis Fischer. Unlike the more respectable academic recuperation, however, which emphasized their gender, the vanguard of lesbian feminism embraced their deviant sexuality, their separatism, their creation of lesbian identity as a transnational site of resistance. This chapter explores the recuperation and enlistment of queer modernism in the creation of lesbian nation and the feminist avant-garde, feeling backward to experimental novelists Bertha Harris and June Arnold, and then back further to their inspirations, including Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Natalie Barney.
