Trailblazer's Poetry Book is to be Auctioned

A rare book of poetry by the lesbian playwright and poet Mercedes de Acosta has come to light and according to the Guardian newspaper, is to be auctioned with a price tag of just under nine thousand pounds.  Mercedes de Acosta was born in March 1892 in New York to a Cuban father and Spanish mother.  She spent the roaring 20s conducting a rapid-fire series of affairs, openly and proudly homosexual, leading the theatre historian Robert A Schanke to name his biography of her That Furious Lesbian.  Her friend Ram Gopal, a dancer, remarked that “when she met men who ran the theatres, they did not want to work with a strong woman who loved women. Men found her too overpowering.”  Mercedes de Acosta died aged 76 on 9 May 1968, living in poverty in New York. Although she is remembered chiefly for the possibly apocryphal claim “I can get any woman away from any man”, de Acosta was also a fierce activist against the Spanish civil war, a campaigner for women’s rights (writing in her memoir: “I believed in every form of independence for women”) and an animal rights campaigner, becoming ­vegetarian and refusing to wear furs.  The sale of the rare book of poetry will be handled by antiquarian book specialists Peter Harrington.