VIVIEN, Renee. La Venus des Aveugles.

(Paris): E. Sansot & Cie, 1904. First edition. 18 × 12 cm. 195 pp.  A scarce and early collection of Vivien’s symbolist‑decadent poems, rich in nocturnal imagery, with erotic and sensual undertones, offering an aesthetic oscillation between beauty and decay.  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 well-known figure within 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.