French Lesbian Icons – Mireille Best, Natalie Barney & Translators

Explore French lesbian icons Mireille Best & Natalie Barney with three translators in conversation at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia.

Mireille Best is the pseudonym of Mireille Lemarchand (1943-2005), who was born and raised in a working-class family in Le Havre, France.  Unable to pursue university studies due to health problems, Best worked in a plastics factory after high school and later as a civil servant.  Published by the prestigious French press Gallimard, Best wrote four volumes of short stories and three novels.

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972) was born to a wealthy railroad car manufacturing family in Dayton, Ohio, though her circle of literary and artistic influence was transatlantic and spanned nearly a century. From the time she was a young girl, Barney had a strong sense of self and identified as a lesbian. She would go on to become an outspoken writer, artist, and host of literary salons for women in her Paris home throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Stephanie Schechner is a Professor Emerita of French at Widener University, Pennsylvania, and has published extensively on Mireille Best as well as on other French and Francophone women writers including Jovette Marchessault, Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Rachilde, Marguerite Duras and Jocelyne François. She has previously published a translation of Mireille Best’s novel Camille in October.

Suzanne Stroh is a translator, poet, performer, and award-winning screenwriter focused on introducing the life and work of Natalie Barney and her circle to new audiences. Her new book, I Remember Her (Headmistress Press, 2025), is the first English translation of Barney’s only known book-length prose poem. Additional titles include the audiobook productions of Francesco Rapazzini’s novel A Night at the Amazon’s, a drawing-room comedy set in Barney’s salon on her 50th birthday in 1926 (co-translated with Sally Hamilton), and Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, by Artemis Leontis (produced for Princeton Audio). Stroh maintains the grave of Natalie and Laura Barney at the Passy cemetery in Paris. Learn more on Instagram @NatalieBarneyRueJacob, or visit her website: NatalieCliffordBarney.com

Samantha Pious is a poet, translator, editor, and researcher interested in the long history of sapphic women’s writing. Her published translations are Renée Vivien, A Crown of Violets (Headmistress Press, 2015, revised 2017); Judith Teixeira, Cactus Flowers (2025); and Natalie Clifford Barney, Selected Poems (2025). A volume of her original poems, Sappho Is Dead, appeared in 2024. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Follow her on Instagram @samantha.pious, or find her online at SamanthaPious.com