VIVIEN, Renee. Dans un Coin de Violettes.

(Paris): E. Sansot & Cie, 1910. First edition. 18 × 12 cm. 143 pp. Preface by Paul Flat. A posthumous issue from Vivien’s final year of publication, issued as part of the Bibliothèque internationale d’édition by É. Sansot & Cie. The collection continues Vivien’s late, elegiac strain: lyric meditations on loss, memory, and the melancholic reveries that run throughout her work. Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn in England in 1877, moved to Paris at twenty-one to pursue a literary career. Between 1901 and her death in 1909 at the age of thirty-two, she produced more than thirty volumes of poetry, short fiction, translations of Sappho’s fragments, and a novel. She wrote exclusively in French, demonstrating a rigorous command of classical French prosody. A devoted scholar of Greek, she brought considerable philological sensitivity to her translations of Sappho. Vivien was also a prominent member of the Parisian lesbian literary circle often referred to as “Paris Tout Lesbos,” and she is now regarded as one of the first significant openly lesbian poets of the twentieth century. A very good copy in the original decorated wrappers featuring violet motifs. Biographers and critics have long connected that imagery to Violette Shillito, Vivien’s childhood friend and early romantic attachment.