26. Solita Solano, letter to Djuna Barnes, winter 1967; Natalie Barney, letters of 21 July 1962 and mid-May 1969; all in the Barnes Collection, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland at College Park.
Most of the characters of Ladies Almanack were identifiable to Natalie Barney and Janet Flanner, who annotated their copies accordingly. Doll Furious is Dolly Wilde; Patience Scalpel, Mina Loy; Senorita Flyabout, Mimi Franchetti; Lady Buck-and-Balk, Una Troubridge; Tilly Tweedin-Blood, Radclyffe Hall; the messengers Nip and Tuck, Flanner and Solano; Bounding Bess, Esther Murphy; and Cynic Sal, Romaine Brooks.
27. Shari Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism: Entering Literary History,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts, 186.
28. It is important to point out for the historical record that, as Karla Jay argues, Natalie Barney herself set about to reject precisely such stereotypes of lesbians as men manqué; she herself reportedly delighted in “femininity.”
29. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980); rpt. in Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986), 23–68. There has been considerable controversy among lesbian-feminists about the notion of a “lesbian continuum.” Rich’s afterword (pp. 68–75) includes some of this discussion.
30. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928), 246.
31. Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism,” 189.
32. Barnes, letter to Peter Hoare, 18 July 1963, quoted in Silence and Power, 337.
33. Djuna Barnes, letter to Natalie Barney, 16 Oct 1963. In Barnes Collection.
34. Julia [Penelope] Stanley and Susan Robbins, “Lesbian Humor,” Women: A Journal of Liberation, May 1977, 26–29.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books by Djuna Barnes
This list includes books and monographs by Barnes (in and out of print) and book-length collections of her shorter works. For a comprehensive bibliography of Barnes’s serial publications, see Douglas Messerli, Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography (David Lewis, 1975).
The Antiphon: A Play. London: Faber and Faber (New York: Farrar, Straus), 1958.
A Book. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.
The Book of Repulsive Women: Eight Rhythms and Five Drawings. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989.
Creatures in an Alphabet. New York: Dial, 1982.
Interviews. Ed. Alyce Barry. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon Press, 1985.
Ladies Almanack. Dijon: Darantière, 1928; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1972; rpt. New York: New York University Press, 1992.
A Night Among the Horses. New York: Horace Liveright, 1929.
New York. Ed. Alyce Barry. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1989.
Nightwood. London: Faber and Faber, 1936; 2nd ed. New York: New Directions, 1946; rpt. 1961.
Ryder. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1928; rpt. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979; rev. ed. Lisle, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
The Selected Works of Djuna Barnes: Spillway, The Antiphon, Nightwood. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1962.
Smoke and Other Stories. Ed. Douglas Messerli. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon Press, 1982; 2nd ed., 1987.
Spillway. London: Faber and Faber, 1962; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.
Vagaries Malicieux: Two Stories. New York: Frank Hallman, 1974.
Selected Books and Articles About Djuna Barnes and Ladies Almanack.
For further sources, consult Messerli’s bibliography, cited above, and Janice Thorn and Kevin Engel’s updated in Broe, Silence and Power, 407-13. Silence and Power is at present the most comprehensive and current source of critical thought on Barnes.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.
Broe, Mary Lynn. “Djuna Barnes,” in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
——, ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Busch, Alexandra. “Eine Satire für Fortgeschrittene: Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack.” Forum für Homosexualität und Literatur 6 (1989): 41–71.
Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1983.
Gildzen, Alex, ed. A Festschrift for Djuna Barnes on Her 80th Birthday. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Libraries, 1972.
Harris, Bertha. “The More Profound Nationality of Their Lesbianism: Lesbian Society in Paris in the 1920’s.” In Amazon Expedition: A Lesbian Feminist Anthology, ed, Phyllis Birkby, Bertha Harris, Jill Johnston, Esther Newton, and Jane O’Wyatt. New York: Times Change Press, 1973, 77–88.
Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, eds. Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
Kannenstine, Louis F. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York University Press, 1977.
Michel, Frann. “Displacing Castration: Nightwood, Ladies Almanack, and Feminine Writing.” Contemporary Literature 30 (Spring 1989): 33–58.
O’Neal, Hank. “Life is painful, nasty and short-in my case it has only been painful and nasty”: Djuna Barnes 1978–1981: An Informal Memoir. New York: Paragon House, 1990.
Plumb, Cheryl J. Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes. Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania: Susquehanna University Press, 1986.
Scott, James B. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976.
LADIES ALMANACK: showing their Signs and their tides; their Moons and their Changes; the Seasons as it is with them; their Eclipses and Equinoxes; as well as a full Record of diurnal and nocturnal Distempers WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY A LADY OF FASHION
FOREWORD
This slight satiric wigging, this Ladies Almanack, anonymously written (in an idle hour), fearfully punctuated, and privately printed (in the twenties) by Darantière at Dijon; illustrated, with apologies to ancient chapbooks, broadsheets, and Images Populaires; sometimes coloured by the mudlark of the bankside and gamine of the quai; hawked about the faubourg and the temple, and sold, for a penny, to the people, cherished by de Gaulle as “the indolent and terrible.”
That chronicle is now set before the compound public eye.
Neap-tide to the Proustian chronicle, gleanings from the shores of Mytilene, glimpses of its novitiates, its rising “saints” and “priestesses,” and thereon to such aptitude and insouciance that they took to gaming and to swapping that “other” of the mystery, the anomaly that calls the hidden name. That, affronted, eats its shadow.