Djuna Barnes

Who Was Djuna Barnes?

Djuna Barnes was one of the most distinctive and difficult modernist writers in American literature — a journalist, illustrator, playwright, and novelist whose masterwork Nightwood (1936) T.S. Eliot called “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” Born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, into an unconventional family, she was largely self-educated and supported herself from an early age as a journalist and illustrator in New York.

Her years in Paris in the 1920s placed her at the center of the expatriate modernist community — she knew Joyce, Eliot, and Pound, and her work bears the marks of that company. Nightwood, set in the nighttime world of Paris and Berlin between the wars, follows a cast of characters whose lives are organized around desire, loss, and the inability to find rest in any of the forms the world offers. The novel’s central figure, the doctor Matthew O’Connor — a failed physician, transvestite, and midnight confessor — delivers some of the most extraordinary prose monologues in English.

Barnes spent the last forty years of her life in almost total reclusion in a small apartment in Greenwich Village, writing very little and seeing almost no one. Her work is significant for TLA because it maps, with unusual precision, the spiritual desolation of a world that has lost its theological bearings — a world of pure night, pure desire, and no dawn.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Nightwood — 1936 — novel
• The Antiphon — 1958 — verse play
• Ladies Almanack — 1928
• Ryder — 1928 — novel