Djuna Barnes
1892-1982
American writer, known for her distinctive style and her early portrayal of lesbian themes in Nightwood. She also wrote occasional newspaper articles, and drew illustrations for her own works. She lived in Paris during the heyday of modernism.
Major works
- The Book of Repulsive Women (1915) – also available online, drawings included, at the University of Pennsylvania Digital Library
- Ryder (1928)
- Ladies Almanack (1928)
- Nightwood (1936)
Known associates
- T.S. Eliot (wrote the foreword to Nightwood)
- Jane Heap
- James Joyce
- Mina Loy
- Marianne Moore
- Thelma Wood (her lover for some time)
Further reading
- Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (Phillip Herring, Viking, 1995)
- Herring details Djuna Barnes’s life and relates it to her literary works, exposing the biographical elements of Barnes’s writing. His work illuminates both her life and the time period of which she was a product.
- Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Mary Lynn Brow, editor; Southern Illinois University Press, 1991)
- This collection of essays offers a scholarly overview of both Barnes’s life and literary work. It includes photographs and sections of quotations and brief autobiographical writings that accompany the academic criticism, providing an excellent starting point of complementary primary sources for a paper.
Primary sources
- The University of Maryland Archives has a collection of Djuna Barnes’s papers. Some of her artwork and certain photographs from the collection are available online: scroll through the collection descriptions and look for the blue “Online” links to the images.
Modernista Research Guide 