Career
She was a prolific writer who produced more than 70 books In France, she is best known for her poem beginning with the line "L"odeur de mon pays était dans une pomme" ("In the smell of an apple I held my native land") Her writings express her love of travel and her love for her native Normandy. L"Ex-voto (1932), for example, describes the life and milieu of the fishermen of Honfleur at the opening of the twentieth century.
She was involved in affairs with several women throughout her lifetime, and she wrote extensively of lesbian love.
In 1902-1903 she wrote a series of love poems to the American writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, published posthumously in 1957 as Nos secrètes amours (Our Secret Loves). She also depicted Barney in her 1930 novel, L"Ange et les Pervers (The Angel and the Perverts), in which she said she "analyzed and described Natalie at length as well as the life into which she initiated me".
The protagonist of the novel is a hermaphrodite named Marion who lives a double life, frequenting literary salons in female dress, then changing from skirt to trousers to attend gay soirées. One admirer wrote to describe Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, stating in part;
"She is adorable.
She sculpts, mounts to horse, loves a woman, then another, and yet another.