American writer and socialite Natalie Clifford Barney was BOTD in 1876. Born in Dayton, Ohio to a wealthy industrialist family, she was educated in Washington and sent to Paris to learn French, settling there with her lover Eva Palmer. When Palmer left her for a Greek man, Barney had an on-off relationship with the courtesan Liane de Pougy. The pair became notorious after Pougy described the affair in her 1901 novel Sapphic Idyll, with a chapter contributed by Barney describing lying at Pougy’s feet during a performance of Sarah Bernhardt‘s Hamlet. She became famous as the hostess of literary salons, which ran for nearly 60 years, and established an Académie des Femmes to promote women writers. Her celebrity guests included Mata Hari, Auguste Rodin, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Radclyffe Hall (who based the character of Valérie Seymour in The Well of Loneliness on Barney), Una Vincenzo, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Eileen Gray, W. Somerset Maugham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Tamara de Łempicka and Truman Capote (who mentioned her in his final book Answered Prayers). She also wrote and self-published lesbian love poems, inspired by the works of Sappho, though had greater success with her non-fiction works Éparpillements, Thoughts of an Amazon and her novel The One Who is Legion. An advocate of free love, Barney ploughed her way through the poets Colette, Renée Vivien (who took their break-up badly, committing suicide the following year), Olive Custance, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Eyre de Lanux and had longer relationships with writer Élisabeth de Gramont and painter Romaine Brooks. She died in 1972, aged 95.