Lilith’s Legacy

This volume, the first of a projected three translating Vivien’s prose, collects all the short work published under that name. Vivien is the most famous pen name of Pauline Mary Tarn (1877–1909), a London-born woman who settled in Paris in the late 1890s and became part of the famous lesbian literary and social circle surrounding Natalie Barney; all of her published work was written in French. Her poetry and prose fuse symbolist and decadent language and influences with the realities of her life as a lesbian. Some of the work collected here is minor, such as the early snippets and prose poems that begin the book, but Vivien’s reworkings of folk tales and Bible stories—such as “The Veil of Vashti,” in which Vashti refuses her husband’s summons to emulate Lilith—are original and beautiful. Her series of horror stories, in which vile male narrators fail to understand or work well with the competent and spectacular women around them, ring queasily true on a social level and are resplendent with gorgeous, dark images. Some of Vivien’s writing has been translated before, but this new effort, both comprehensive and readable, makes her much more accessible to an Anglophone audience. (July)