Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Djuna Barnes
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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.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
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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.
NCB
has been a magnet for biographers (recently as the subject with Romaine Brooks
of Diana Souhami
's Wild Girls in 2004 and as a minor character in Joan Schenkar
's Truly Wilde: the Unsettling...
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
22, 26-7
With the loyal support of French literary figures such as Valery Larbaud
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Bryher
Though emotionally empty, the marriage was artistically productive. Most significantly, Bryher's introductions and family funds allowed McAlmon to establish his influential press, Contact Editions
. Thus, Bryher's money and social connections enabled the publication of...
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...