When I was
an undergraduate at Cornell University I received a grant to travel to
the University of Maryland, where the Djuna Barnes archive is housed at
the Hornbake Library. I was a senior then, 20 years old, and the grant
was awarded in support of research for my honors thesis, which focused
on Barnes’s best-known novel, Nightwood, but also examined her
body of work within the context of Modernist literature as a whole. As
an aspiring writer and a young queer woman, the novel’s central
narrative (the unhealthy love affair between Robin Vote and Nora Flood)
appealed to me for both stylistic and personal reasons, so when the
opportunity arose to study the novel in a more critical context via this
research grant I jumped on the chance. Over Christmas vacation, I
traveled back and forth between my sister’s place in Northern Virginia
and the Hornbake Library, where I examined the archives on microfiche,
taking notes in a black and white composition book.
Born June 12, 1892, Barnes came of age in
the height of the Modernist movement. At age 20, she moved to New York
City with her mother and three of her brothers and there began a
lifelong study of art and literature that led her to briefly attend the
Pratt Institute. To help support her family, Barnes got as a job as a
reporter at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where she made a name for
herself via yellow journalism, penning articles with flashy headlines
like “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed.” Soon enough, she became part of
Greenwich Village’s Bohemian community and began publishing fiction and
poetry. In 1915, she published the chapbook The Book of Repulsive Women, which she later disdained as “idiotic.” Her first major works (the semi-autobiographical novel Ryder and the roman à clef Ladies Almanack)
followed 13 years later, in 1928. In the intervening years, she moved
to Paris, made friends of Peggy Guggenheim, and engaged in love affairs
with both men and women. Her affair with Thelma Wood inspired her
greatest work, the novel Nightwood. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/djuna-barnes-the-most-famous-unknown-of-the-century/
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