Ladies Almanack - Softcover

Barnes, Djuna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1614279292 ISBN 13: 9781614279297

Publisher: Martino Fine Books, 2016

Synopsis

2016 Reprint of 1928 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Carrying the longish title of "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," Barnes work is a novel in which real persons or actual events figure under disguise. Its subject is the predominantly lesbian social circle centering on Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris in the 1920s. It is written in an archaic, Rabelaisian style, with Barnes's own illustrations in the style of Elizabethan woodcuts. The obscure language, inside jokes and ambiguity of the work have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barney herself loved the book and re-read it throughout her life.

About this title

Review

Djuna Barnes must have had great fun writing and illustrating this book. It's a lively lampoon of her lesbian chums of Left Bank Paris in the 1920s. The main character, Dame Evangeline Musset, is based on the notorious dyke Natalie Barney. Structured as a month-by-month almanac in a style that owes as much to Shakespeare's comedies as to any literature of the intervening centuries, Barnes's book follows the Dame's amorous, often naughty, adventures.

About the Author

Although Djuna Barnes was a New Yorker who spent much of her long life in Greenwich Village, where she died a virtual recluse in 1982, she resided for extended periods of time in France and England. Her writings are representative modernist works in that they seem to transcend all national boundaries to take place in a land peculiarly her own. Deeply influenced by the French symbolists of the late nineteenth century and by the surrealists of the 1930s, she also wrote as a liberated woman, whose unconventional way of life is reflected in the uncompromising individuality of her literary style. Barnes's dreamlike and haunted writings have never found a wide popular audience, but they have strongly influenced such writers as Rebecca West, Nelson Algren, Dahlberg, Lowry, Miller, and especially Nin, in whose works a semifictional character named Djuna sometimes appears. In 1915 Barnes anonymously published The Book of Repulsive Women. Not long after she moved to Paris and became associated with the colony of writers and artists who made that city the international center of culture during the 1920s and early 1930s. Her Ladies Almanack was privately printed in Paris in 1928, the same year that Liveright in the United States published Ryder, her first novel. The book on which Barnes's fame largely rests is Nightwood (1936), a surrealistic story set in Paris and the United States, dealing with the complex relationships among a group of strangely obsessed characters, most of them homosexuals and lesbians. Barnes wrote little after Nightwood. In 1952, she professed to Malcolm Lowry that the experience of writing that searing work so frightened her that she was unable to write anything after it. Fortunately, her literary talents revived with The Antiphon, a verse-drama originally published in 1958, which is now available in Selected Works (1962).

About this edition

• Publisher: Martino Fine Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1614279292
• ISBN 13: 9781614279297
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88