Natalia Negru

Natalia Negru (December 5, 1882 – September 2, 1962) was a Romanian poet and prose writer. Although her literary contributions were relatively minor, she is noted for being at the center of a love triangle involving her first husband, Ștefan Octavian Iosif, and her second, Dimitrie Anghel. The men were close friends, but Anghel seduced her, she divorced Iosif, who died of his grief, and then Anghel shot himself during a quarrel with her, dying of the wound two weeks later. Two years after Anghel's death, her daughter with Iosif was killed by a German bomb during World War I. She lived for four and a half decades after these turbulent events, in relatively uneventful fashion.

Born in Buciumeni, Galați, her parents were Avram Negru, a teacher, and his wife Elena (née Dumitrescu). Negru attended primary school in Galați, where her father worked, and high school in Bucharest. She enrolled in the literature and philosophy faculty of Bucharest University in 1901, graduating in 1907. Fond of reading in the University Foundation Library, she met its caretaker, the published poet Ștefan Octavian Iosif, in 1903. A grateful Iosif asked her for poems, one of which he published in a prominent position in Sămănătorul. In order to attract his attention, she presented an essay about one of his poems to her class. The couple married in July 1904; the three-day wedding took place at Tecucel on the outskirts of Tecuci, where her father had built her a house and granted her ten hectares of vineyards. Guests included Nicolae Iorga and Mihail Sadoveanu, who wrote accounts of the festivities. Their daughter Corina was born a year later.

Dimitrie Anghel, Iosif's closest friend and a collaborator on poems, visited the family home almost daily and fell in love with Natalia. Iosif broke with Anghel in spring 1910, and became alienated from his wife that summer. Anghel eventually convinced her to move in with him, and she sued for divorce in November. She won the case the following June because two letters from Iosif proved he had left their home. In December, after suing but before the divorce was granted, she traveled to Paris for health reasons and later invited Iosif to spend a month together, presumably seeking a reconciliation. He declined, and Anghel went instead. Devastated by the betrayal of the woman he idolized and who was the inspiration behind most of his later work, as well as of his best friend, Iosif died of a stroke in June 1913.

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