The poet known as Renée Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn to a British father and an American mother in London.  Her writing career was short but prolific: she published more than 20 volumes of poetry and prose, almost exclusively in French, before her death at the age of thirty-two. The poetry published in her lifetime garnered her a reputation as one of the best second-generation Symbolist poets. Proto-feminist in her vision, Vivien was just one of many subsequent expatriate women writers and artists who found Paris a more amenable home for expressing same-sex desires in life and art than was possible elsewhere.

Vivien's family fortune came from her paternal grandfather, who owned a chain of dry-goods stores. The Tarn family moved from London to Paris when Vivien was a year old, and it

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Citation: Imhof, Robin. "Renée Vivien". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 January 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13743, accessed 19 March 2024.]

13743 Renée Vivien 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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