Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, into a family of spectacular dysfunction — her father was a polygamist and failed artist, her grandmother a suffragist and spiritualist — and became one of the most brilliant and enigmatic figures of literary modernism. Her novel Nightwood (1936), introduced by T.S. Eliot, is a dark, lyrical, almost hallucinatory work about obsessive love among expatriates in Paris and Berlin that defies conventional categorization. It is at once a modernist masterpiece and a founding text of queer literature.

Life and Career

Barnes was largely home-educated by her grandmother, who exposed her to literature, art, and spiritualism. Her family life was traumatic — she later hinted at sexual abuse, and the entire household was governed by her father’s authoritarian eccentricities. She began working as a journalist and illustrator in New York, writing vivid, witty pieces for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and other newspapers. Her early journalism — interviews, feature articles, illustrated sketches — is remarkable and has been collected as New York (1989).

In the early 1920s she moved to Paris and became a central figure of the Left Bank expatriate scene. She was part of the circle around Natalie Barney’s salon and had a turbulent decade-long relationship with the sculptor and silverpoint artist Thelma Wood, who became the model for Robin Vote in Nightwood.

Ryder (1928), a bawdy, formally experimental family saga, was a bestseller — one of the few experimental novels to sell well on publication. Ladies Almanack (1928), a privately printed satire of Natalie Barney’s lesbian salon, was sold by Barnes herself on the streets of Paris.

Nightwood (1936, Faber and Faber) is her masterpiece. T.S. Eliot, who wrote the introduction, championed the book through Faber. The novel follows five characters through Paris, Vienna, and America, circling around Robin Vote, a strange, almost somnambulant woman who drifts through relationships and genders. The prose is dense, baroque, incantatory — Doctor Matthew O’Connor’s monologues are among the most extraordinary sustained passages in English modernism.

After Nightwood, Barnes largely stopped publishing. She lived in a tiny apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village for over forty years, becoming increasingly reclusive. She produced one more major work: The Antiphon (1958), a verse drama about a family reunion that is transparently autobiographical and almost unbearably intense. She died in 1982 at ninety, having spent her last decades in near-silence.

Major Works and Themes

Nightwood is about the impossibility of possessing another person — and the impossibility of stopping the attempt. Its themes are love, loss, gender, the night world, and the human capacity for self-destruction. The prose operates closer to poetry than conventional fiction.

Barnes’s work is centrally concerned with gender and sexuality at a time when such concerns were largely suppressed in literary culture. Ladies Almanack celebrates lesbian community with wit and frankness. Nightwood’s Robin Vote is one of the first gender-fluid characters in serious literature.

The Forty-Year Silence

Barnes’s withdrawal after Nightwood is one of the most dramatic silences in literary history — more extreme than Henry Green’s twenty-one-year silence, more deliberate than Salinger’s thirty-four-year absence. She lived at 5 Patchin Place, in a single room, for over four decades. She refused interviews, discouraged visitors, and was famously hostile to the admirers who attempted to contact her. When a young writer asked to visit, she reportedly replied: “I am not a salon.” E. E. Cummings, who lived across the way at 4 Patchin Place, was one of her few friends.

The silence was not a failure of inspiration but a form of self-preservation. Barnes had been broken by the relationship with Thelma Wood, by alcoholism, by poverty, and by the indifference of the literary world to work that defied its categories. The Antiphon — the verse drama she laboured over for years — was greeted with bewilderment when it finally appeared. Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General, was one of its few champions, translating it into Swedish. The play’s oblique, densely allusive language made demands that even sympathetic readers found excessive.

Yet the silence also created the legend. Barnes became the phantom of Greenwich Village — a figure of almost mythic reclusiveness whose very inaccessibility enhanced the aura of Nightwood. The novel gained readers steadily through the decades, finding its natural audience among queer readers, feminist scholars, and anyone drawn to prose that operates at the boundary between fiction and poetry.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Nightwood was admired from the start by a small, devoted readership — Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Anaïs Nin — but never reached a wide audience. It has since been reclaimed as a queer classic and a masterpiece of modernist prose. Barnes’s influence is felt in the work of Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, and other writers who blend lyricism with gender exploration. Her reputation, still growing, rests on a single short novel — but what a novel.

Key Works

• The Book of Repulsive Women (1915)
• A Book (1923)
• Ryder (1928)
• Ladies Almanack (1928)
• Nightwood (1936)
• The Antiphon (1958)

Collecting Barnes

The Book of Repulsive Women (1915, Bruno Chap Books) is a small chapbook of poems and drawings — genuinely rare and highly prized: $2,000–$8,000 for copies in good condition.

Ladies Almanack (1928, privately printed in Paris, edition of 1,050 copies) is an important modernist rarity: $500–$2,000. Fifty copies were printed on special paper and hand-colored by Barnes herself — these are of extraordinary value.

Nightwood (1936, Faber and Faber, London) is the true first edition, preceding the US Harcourt Brace edition. Copies in the Faber dust jacket are scarce: $1,000–$4,000.

Ryder (1928, Horace Liveright) first edition: $200–$600.

Barnes signed very rarely — she was reclusive for most of her adult life — making inscribed copies extremely scarce and valuable.