Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Djuna Barnes
-
Standard Name: Barnes, Djuna
Birth Name: Djuna Barnes
Pseudonym: Lydia Steptoe
Pseudonym: A Lady of Fashion
Pseudonym: Gunga Duhl, the Pen Performer
Best-known for her novel Nightwood, 1936, about her fellow Americans in Paris, DB
wrote in a number of other genres: plays, short stories, poetry, and journalism. Other works like the Ladies Almanack defy generic categorisation. Her writing is heavily if not cryptically autobiographical. Her works frequently appeared with her own illustrations. She based many of her characters on her family, ex-lovers, and acquaintances. Critic Mary Lynn Broe
writes: Most of Barnes' major writings—the short stories in Spillway, the novel Ryder, but particularly the heavily excised twenty-nine drafts of The Antiphon—encode the sexual violations and erotic entanglements in the patriarchal family.
Broe, Mary Lynn. “Introduction”. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 3-23.
In addition to these collaborative works, AS
has published an anthology of her own favourite texts, those she sees as essential to her development as a writer. Published twice under different titles—The Reader (2006)...
AC
's extravagant fiction combines many genres, conventions, and styles, and she looks for the hidden realities behind appearances, paying particular attention to sexuality and women's eroticism. Critic Linden Peach
sees important elements in her...
Textual Features
Deborah Levy
The detached wryness of this book reminded Lauren Elkin
of Djuna Barnes
.
Elkin, Lauren, and Deborah Levy. “Introduction”. Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography. Two Early Novels, Bloomsbury, p. vii - xiii.
x
The characters are rootless as well as detached.Lapinski, a Russian migrant living hand-to-mouth in the underbelly of London, tells the...
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
298
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Wickes, George. The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
166, 178
Intertextuality and Influence
Brigid Brophy
One of the twelve sections is no more fifty words. The novel's decadent style inhabits the minds of several characters, particularly that of the tall, fragile, perpetually exhausted but secretly sexually voracious Antonia Mount. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anna Wickham
Some of the most interesting poems first published in this collection are the playful or satirical responses to other writers. To Men answers a poem of the same title by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
, whose...