Natalie Clifford Barney, who lived most of her long life in Paris, was a legendary figure in France but almost completely unknown in her native land. She is the Amazone to whom Remy de Gourmont addressed his Letters a l'Amazone (1914); she figures as a character in half-a-dozen works of fiction; and her name appears in scores of memoirs of the period ranging from the belle epoque almost to the present day. For sixty years her house at 20, rue Jacob was a Paris landmark, the setting of an international salon frequented by many of the leading writers and intellectuals of the century. Her own writings, chiefly in French, included verse, drama, fiction, essays, and epigrams, spanning the period from 1900 to 1963. But her reputation is due even more to the emancipated ideas by which she lived and to the personal magnetism which she exercised in her many love affairs. She...