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Does she see Dolly ' s life as a one-woman show ? " I was drawn to the theatricality of Dolly ' s life and her creation of her own identity as the other Wilde ," she replies .
Like her uncle , Dolly ' s passions were for those of her own sex , but chosen from a rather superior stratum of society . Her chief lover was the salonniere Natalie Clifford Barney , who for decade after decade collected writers and artists at her house in the rue Jacob , and whose inner circle included all the great Paris-American and French lesbian women of her time .
Dolly also managed a brief affair with Alla Nazimova , who played Salome in the 1922 film . As Dolly bore an astonishing physical resemblance to Oscar , this must have been an uncanny experience for Nazimova .
It was the happy thought of trying to discover if Natalie Barney ' s housekeeper was still alive that started Joan Schenkar , then living in Paris , on the quest that has resulted in her now possessing much of her source material . As she interviewed very ancient ladies , she realised she was forming their link with the future . This , she thought , called for no conventional biography , " with facts chronologically strung out like washing on a line ". Instead , she has produced a series of vignettes , recreating the world in which Dolly rubbed , let us say shoulders , with Djuna Barnes and Nancy Cunard , with Jean Cocteau and Cecil Beaton , with Osbert Sitwell and Nancy Mitford and Mina Loy . ( Loy was a distant connection : she married
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