Renée Vivien
On 11 June 1877, Renée Vivien was born in London, a British citizen who would go on to write poetry and prose in French, aligning her work with the literary movement known as Parnassianism.
Vivien worked as both a poet and a writer throughout her life. Though born in London and a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, she chose French as the language of her creative output. Her movement, Parnassianism, situated her within a specific current of French literary culture. She died in Paris on 18 November 1909, at the age of thirty-two.
Vivien's work as a poet and writer, produced in French despite her British origins, reflects the cross-cultural character of her career. She was associated with Parnassianism, and she died in Paris, the city where her life ended in 1909. The concrete facts of her biography — born in London, writing in French, working within Parnassianism, and dying in Paris before the age of thirty-three — define the arc of a brief but deliberately shaped literary life.
Quotes by Renée Vivien
What matters to us, the judgment of men? What have we to doubt, since we are pure before life?
I am at the age when a maiden gives her hand to the man whom her weakness searches and dreads, and I have not chosen a companion for the road.
She embodies all the melancholy of autumn. She has learned to cherish with mournful tenderness a past she dares not remember.
I’m infected with the romantic fever. It began in my teens when I read Baudelaire in secret.
I adore fairy stories. And I still have the wistful spirit of a child that listens wide-eyed to the marvellous tales told over and over during long winter evenings.