Jack of All Arts

Djuna Barnes

Born: June 12, 1892
Birthplace: Storm King Mountain, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, United States
Died: June 18, 1982 (age 90), New York City, New York, United States
Gender Identity: Cisgender woman
Sexual Orientation: Lesbian
Pronouns: She/her
Nationality: American
Ethnicity: White
Profession: Writer, journalist, poet, playwright, visual artist
Years Active: 1910s–1960s

Early Life (1892–1912)

Djuna Barnes (/ˈdʒuːnɑː/ JOO-nah) Djuna Barnes was born on June 12, 1892, in a log cabin on Storm King Mountain near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. Her birth name remained Djuna, an unusual choice derived from a family friend, and her upbringing was anything but conventional. Her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes, was a writer, suffragist, and former salon hostess who had once hosted literary figures like Walt Whitman. Her father, Wald Barnes (born Henry Aaron Budington), was a would-be composer and artist with little success, and an advocate of free love and polygamy. In 1897, he invited his mistress Fanny Clark to live with the family, creating a complex household in which Barnes was raised alongside several siblings and half-siblings. The family structure was fluid and financially unstable, with Zadel often supporting everyone through occasional writing and begging letters.

As the second-oldest child, Djuna often cared for her younger siblings and was homeschooled in a chaotic setting. Her father and grandmother taught her languages, music, and literature but neglected formal academics like spelling and mathematics. Barnes would later claim to have had no formal schooling at all, though records suggest she may have attended public school sporadically in her early teens.

Barnes’s early years were marked by instability, poverty, and trauma. She later alluded to sexual abuse within the household and referenced rape in both veiled and direct ways in her fiction and drama. Scholars have speculated that she may have been raped at 16, possibly with the knowledge or complicity of her father. She also shared a bed with her grandmother well into her adolescence, and suggestive correspondence raises disturbing questions about boundaries and control.

Shortly before turning 18, Barnes was coerced by her family into a private marriage ceremony with Percy Faulkner, her stepmother’s brother, who was 52 years old. The marriage, unsupported by clergy and likely unconsummated, lasted only two months. Her family viewed it as a solution to their financial troubles and her growing autonomy. Barnes rejected this future entirely.

By 1912, the Barnes family was unraveling. Her mother Elizabeth took Djuna and three sons to New York City and filed for divorce, while Wald remained with Fanny. This move marked Djuna Barnes’s transition into adulthood and laid the groundwork for her independence, artistic growth, and immersion into Greenwich Village’s bohemian world.

Journalism and Bohemian New York (1912–1921)

In 1912, Barnes moved to New York City with her mother and brothers after her parents separated. She studied art briefly at the Pratt Institute (1912–1913) and the Art Students League (1915–1916) but left formal education to support her family. She boldly presented herself at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, declaring, “I can draw and write, and you’d be a fool not to hire me.” She was hired and began a prolific career in journalism.

Between 1913 and 1919, Barnes wrote features, interviews, poetry, and illustrations for nearly every major New York paper, including The New York World, McCall’s, Vanity Fair, The Trend, and The Morning Telegraph. She became known for immersive journalism, often placing herself at the center of the story. She spent a night in jail for a feature, reported on boxing matches from ringside, and volunteered to be force-fed to understand the treatment of hunger-striking suffragists. In a 1914 article, she wrote, “I had shared the greatest experience of the bravest of my sex.”

She satirized figures like conservative suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt and championed more militant activists like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. She also explored gender roles through articles such as “My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight,” questioning traditional notions of femininity and documenting women’s presence in male-dominated spaces.

Her work included illustrations in an Art Nouveau style influenced by Aubrey Beardsley. She became deeply involved in Greenwich Village’s bohemian community, living independently, attending intellectual salons, and writing plays and fiction. She joined the Provincetown Players, an experimental theatre group, and had three plays produced by them between 1919 and 1920. Though often critiqued as juvenilia, these works foreshadowed her later, more experimental dramatic style.

In 1915, Guido Bruno published her first book, The Book of Repulsive Women, a collection of poems and drawings centered on eroticism, urban women, and taboo desire. Despite its controversial content and apparent references to lesbian relationships, the book evaded censorship,likely because the coded language was misunderstood by moral authorities.

Her romantic and social life during this period was equally bold. She lived openly among a sexually liberated crowd and had relationships with both men and women, including a passionate affair with fellow journalist Mary Pyne, who died in 1919. Barnes would later care for Pyne in her final days.

Barnes’s Greenwich Village years established her as a fearless chronicler of her time, fiercely independent in both art and life. Her early journalism and avant-garde plays laid the foundation for her later literary innovations and made her a fixture of America’s early modernist and queer cultural history.

Paris and the Modernist Movement (1921–1930)

In 1921, Barnes traveled to Paris on assignment for McCall’s magazine and remained for nearly a decade. She quickly became embedded in the expatriate literary scene, mingling with modernist giants like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Her profile rose after interviewing Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922, a piece that also featured her own illustration of him. Though she admired Joyce’s literary innovation, she felt daunted by Ulysses, declaring, “Who has the nerve to write another line after that?”

Barnes became a frequent guest of Natalie Clifford Barney’s literary salon at 20 rue Jacob, a nexus for lesbian intellectuals and creatives in Paris. Barney and Barnes formed a lifelong friendship, and Barnes drew inspiration from the salon’s guests for her 1928 satirical roman à clef Ladies Almanack. Written in archaic Elizabethan-style English and accompanied by Barnes’s own illustrations, the book was privately printed and sold clandestinely due to its queer themes.

During this period, she lived with sculptor-turned-illustrator Thelma Wood. Their passionate but tumultuous relationship deeply influenced Barnes’s writing, with Wood later serving as the inspiration for Robin Vote in Nightwood. The two shared a home on Boulevard Saint-Germain and were part of a vibrant lesbian circle that included Romaine Brooks, Élisabeth de Gramont, and Mina Loy. Barnes often clashed with Wood’s alcoholism and non-monogamy, and their eventual breakup in 1928 left Barnes devastated.

Barnes also developed a creative and emotionally intense friendship with Dadaist artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, supporting the Baroness financially and attempting to publish her poetry. Although Barnes never completed the planned biography of Freytag-Loringhoven, her efforts helped preserve the Baroness’s legacy.

Barnes published several works during her Paris years: A Book (1923), Ryder (1928), Ladies Almanack (1928), and A Night Among the Horses (1929). These texts experimented with narrative structure, language, and genre, often using hybrid forms and richly layered prose. Ryder, her semi-autobiographical novel, featured illustrations censored by U.S. authorities due to their bawdy nature. The novel parodied multiple literary styles and satirized the unconventional family she grew up in.

Despite commercial challenges, her work was lauded among the avant-garde. Her apartment at Rue Saint-Romain became a gathering place for writers and artists. Even as her personal life frayed, Barnes’s creative powers reached their peak, laying the foundation for her masterpiece Nightwood.

Nightwood and Literary Fame (1930s)

Djuna Barnes wrote much of Nightwood during the early 1930s, especially while staying at Hayford Hall in Devon, England,nicknamed “Hangover Hall”,a country manor rented by Peggy Guggenheim and frequented by artists and writers. The tense emotional atmosphere of this communal space, exacerbated by psychological games like “Truth,” seeped into the emotional texture of the novel. Emily Coleman, one of the guests and a literary editor, became instrumental in shaping the final manuscript. She urged structural revisions and strongly advocated for its publication.

The novel was rejected by several publishers before T.S. Eliot, working at Faber and Faber, agreed to take it on. He wrote a preface praising its poetic style and complexity, though he also made editorial changes to soften depictions of sexuality and religion for censorship reasons. The U.S. edition, published in 1937 by Harcourt, Brace, retained Eliot’s introduction and edits.

Nightwood is a nonlinear, modernist novel that centers on the doomed relationship between Robin Vote, a restless, enigmatic woman, and Nora Flood, her emotionally tormented lover. The novel also features Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a flamboyant, philosophical, cross-dressing figure who delivers long, quasi-poetic monologues on suffering, identity, and God. These speeches are considered some of the richest queer soliloquies in early 20th-century literature.

The novel did not sell well initially. Barnes received no advance, and her first royalty payment from Faber totaled only £43. However, it was widely praised by literary peers. Dylan Thomas called it one of the greatest books ever written by a woman; William Burroughs described it as one of the finest novels of the 20th century. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece of both lesbian fiction and modernist language.

Peggy Guggenheim financially supported Barnes during the writing process, despite tensions between them. By 1939, Barnes was emotionally and physically drained. She attempted suicide in London that February, prompting Guggenheim to fund her return to New York, where she stayed briefly with her ailing mother.

Nightwood became a cult classic in literary and queer communities. Over time, it gained broader scholarly attention and was reissued multiple times. A restored edition based on Barnes’s original manuscript,reinstating passages cut by Eliot,was later published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1995, edited by Cheryl Plumb.

The novel’s haunting lyricism, exploration of gender fluidity, and symbolic intensity secured Barnes’s place among the literary greats of her era.

Later Years and The Antiphon (1940s–1950s)

After returning to New York in 1939, Barnes experienced years of emotional turmoil, health problems, and poverty. Her alcoholism worsened, and in 1940 her family committed her to a sanatorium in upstate New York to dry out. Furious, she began working on a family exposé, ultimately channeled into her final major work, The Antiphon. She broke ties with her mother after a bitter falling out and found herself with no permanent home.

Eventually, she moved into a small apartment at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she would reside for the remaining 42 years of her life. During the 1940s, she published very little and remained dependent on small stipends from friends like Peggy Guggenheim and Emily Coleman. Guggenheim supported her reluctantly; Coleman sent her $20 a month despite financial strain. Barnes also briefly worked for Henry Holt as a manuscript reader but was fired due to her sharp, dismissive reports.

In 1950, Barnes gave up alcohol to focus on writing The Antiphon, a verse drama that drew heavily on her traumatic family experiences. She wrote it with intensity, claiming she worked “with clenched teeth” and that her handwriting had become as jagged as a “dagger.” The play, written in a dense, poetic style, explores a decaying English family confronting their past,featuring themes of betrayal, abuse, and psychological decay. Characters wear masks, deliver soliloquies, and act out rituals that allude to both Greek tragedy and modernist alienation.

The Antiphon was published in 1958 by Riverside Press and premiered in Stockholm in 1961 in a Swedish translation, with a French adaptation staged by the Comédie-Française in Paris in 1990. Despite praise from some critics, the play baffled many readers and failed to reach a broad audience. Her brother Thurn wrote to her accusing her of airing long-buried family grievances. Barnes defended her work in the margins of his letter, writing, “Not dead. Justice.”

Following The Antiphon, Barnes turned to poetry, writing up to 500 drafts of some poems. Though she worked constantly, she published little during this period. Her arthritis worsened, making it difficult to write or even turn on her desk lamp. Still, she insisted on working eight hours a day.

During these years, Barnes became increasingly reclusive. She declined interviews and avoided social interaction. She refused overtures from Anaïs Nin, Bertha Harris, Carson McCullers, and other feminist and literary figures. She even called a bookstore demanding it change its name after learning it was called Djuna Books. Though she had many female lovers earlier in life, Barnes later insisted, “I am not a lesbian; I just loved Thelma.”

Despite her withdrawal, Barnes’s reputation grew in literary circles. In 1961, she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1981, she received a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Legacy

Djuna Barnes’s legacy as a groundbreaking modernist and queer writer has only deepened with time. Though she spent her later decades in isolation, she was recognized during her lifetime by institutions like the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1961) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1981). Her reclusive nature contrasted with the explosive impact of her literary work, which reshaped modernist literature and laid foundational stones for lesbian and queer representation.

Her novel Nightwood has come to be regarded as one of the most important LGBTQ+ books of the 20th century. T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and many others praised its poetic complexity and psychological depth. Feminist and queer scholars have since championed her literary contributions, especially for how she interrogated gender, desire, and identity.

Barnes influenced a broad spectrum of later writers including Truman Capote, David Foster Wallace, Bertha Harris, John Hawkes, and Anaïs Nin. Literary critic Bertha Harris once declared that Barnes provided “practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world” since Sappho. Her fiercely independent voice, eschewing both traditional gender roles and literary conventions, remains a touchstone in women’s and queer literary canons.

Her unpublished writings, drawings, and correspondence,including letters with Emily Coleman and material on Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven,have provided valuable insight into the avant-garde networks of her time. These archives, held at the University of Maryland and the New York Public Library, have fueled a resurgence in scholarship and artistic reinterpretation of her work.

Her contributions to preserving the legacy of Baroness Elsa helped shape feminist Dada studies. Barnes was portrayed in theatrical works such as Djuna: What of the Night (1991) and featured in cameo form in films like Midnight in Paris (2011). Her work continues to be included in queer literary anthologies and university curricula, and Nightwood consistently ranks among the most influential gay and lesbian novels of all time.

Though she often resisted identity labels and refused to align herself with movements, Barnes’s fierce individuality and unflinching exploration of queer identity, psychological complexity, and social marginality make her one of the most enduring literary figures of the modernist period.

Complete Works

Books, Plays, and Major Publications:

Unauthorized or Miscellaneous Publications:

Trivia and Cultural Impact

  • Famously reclusive, Barnes once told Carson McCullers to “go the hell away” and asked a feminist bookstore to change its name.
  • Her character “Dr. O’Connor” was likely inspired by herself and was one of early literature’s most complex queer figures.
  • Djuna Barnes is featured in plays, films, and queer studies curricula around the world.

Sources Consulted:

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