Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes wrote Nightwood, one of the strangest novels in English, and then spent forty years in one room in Greenwich Village writing very little. She was raised in a household run by her father and his mistress alongside his wife, with no formal schooling, and was married at sixteen to a man of fifty-two, apparently at her family's arrangement; she wrote later of being raped, and the accounts differ on by whom. She supported herself in New York from her teens as a journalist with a taste for stunt reporting - she had herself force-fed to describe what was being done to imprisoned suffragettes, and the piece is still cited. In Paris in the 1920s she was part of the expatriate circle around Sylvia Beach and Natalie Barney, and her long relationship with the silverpoint artist Thelma Wood is the material of Nightwood, published in 1936 with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, who edited it. The book is about desire and self-destruction among expatriates and is written in a baroque, incantatory prose that has no obvious model; it was one of the first novels in English to treat lesbian relationships without disguise, and Eliot's preface is partly an attempt to make that publishable. She drank heavily, returned to New York in 1940, and lived from 1940 until her death in a small flat on Patchin Place, refusing visitors, revising a verse play, and outliving nearly everyone she had known. She was eighty-nine. Ladies Almanack, printed privately in Paris in 1928, is a satire of Natalie Barney s circle written in mock-Elizabethan English. Nightwood has never been out of print. She said late in life that she was the most famous unknown of the century.

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