Published in 2019
48 pages
Djuna Barnes was an American writer known for Nightwood, a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature. She played a significant role in the development of twentieth-century English-language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 1930s bohemian Paris.
What is this book about?
‘I have quite changed my mind. I am going to run away and become a boy.’
In these three stories, written by Djuna Barnes under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, three characters find themselves on the brink of a sexual awakening – accompanied by guns, whips, and worldly innuendo.
A fourteen-year-old girl plans to become ‘a virago’, until her mother intercepts her first tryst by dressing up as her male lover. A boy of the same age is lured into the forest by his father’s mistress. A woman of forty falls in love and longs to kill herself, so unbearable is the return of the youth she thought she wanted. ‘Alice’, she tells herself, ‘be a man.’
Barnes makes gender and desire seem slippery and joyful – and makes the fictional Lydia Steptoe seem like a writer for our time.
