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“... head, a lukewarm, intelligent face. She might be an actress, a spy, a photographer. The woman is Djuna Barnes. What I am looking for, and can’t see, is the grotesque, the decadent, the rotten; the slop, the left-over, the bilious. Where did she store it all? Where did that live? Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in ...”

“... Not long after Ezra Pound, the precocious Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris already equipped with a style derived from the Jacobean dramatists and French post-symbolist poets, and so with as good a claim as any to be counted among the founders of Modernism. In 1936 T. S. Eliot warmly sponsored Nightwood, and one has heard since that her vision of Hell can be traced as an influence in Nathanael West and Malcolm Lowry, and her sort of Gothic fantasy in John Hawkes ...”

“... people’, though mostly important ones: the publisher Marguerite Caetani, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were ...”

“... during which her poems were published in the Little Review and the Dial. Her close friendship with Djuna Barnes dates from this time. But after she received news that Haweis had taken Giles, who was 12, to live with him in the Caribbean, Loy returned to Florence. Deciding that Joella, now a teenager, had grown up disappointingly bourgeois and ...”

“... these considerations seemed to have anything to do with it; not even species, if we are to believe Djuna Barnes, quoted in the notes: when asked if she was a lesbian she replied, ‘If a horse loved me I might be that.’ It is quite a point of view. When it comes to the other two themes, religion and analysis, the book is too often ...”

“... has long been a cultic site in the lesbian imagination. Stein and Toklas, Barney, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Dolly Wilde, Janet Flanner, H.D. – we’ve been hearing about them for ages and the line-up never changes. If anything, thanks to influential (and romanticising) books like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and ...”

“... which, as Kenneth Lynn cogently expresses it, is not ‘a haunted Nick Adams, or a crippled Jake Barnes, or a hollowed-out Frederic Henry, but an overbearing know-it-all named Ernest Hemingway’. Max Eastman said Hemingway had false hair on his chest. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, called his courage into question. Of course, there ...”

“... and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely!’ As Djuna Barnes reports Joyce to have said, ‘there is not one single serious line in it.’It is probable that the open spaces of Dublin saw an amount of action at a time when people seldom lived alone and lovers had few places to go. (Today’s rental crisis ...”

“... with homosexuals; between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from ...”

“... in shadow … Everything she did … was done with an energy which might be called extravagant.’ Djuna Barnes said that Coleman was ‘marvellous company slightly stunned’. In her fifties, after Coleman had converted to Catholicism, she went on a week’s silent retreat to Stanbrook Abbey and stayed on for eleven years, in a bedsit, writing reams of ...”

“... concessions to her readers, it’s true, and in this she is following a tradition that runs from Djuna Barnes and Joyce, say, through Henry Green and Beckett and Robbe-Grillet to Burroughs and Christine Brooke-Rose. The dust jacket flaps of novels published by Calder and Boyars between 1966 and 1972 list their books under the varying heads of ...”

“... Gertrude Stein, but mostly steered clear of her salon; she tended to mock the coterie around Djuna Barnes, with their white gloves and martinis at the Flore; and seems to have spent her spare time elegantly bowing out of romantic entanglements and avoiding glamorous or gossipy circles – the real drama was in her work. In 1922 she opened a shop ...”

“... illuminate, brilliantly at times, the passages that concern her, from Flaubert, Zola, Proust and Djuna Barnes. If there is a problem, here, it has to do with the generality of the claim that description in all its forms ‘inherently generates both the world in which events take place and subsequently the events themselves’. The claim comes ...”

“... a surge of interest in ‘Modernist women’: H.D., Bryher, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Harriet Monroe and many others. These women experimented not only in their writing, but also in their lives, by rejecting conventional sexual roles and by establishing networks of support and patronage. Unfortunately, however, the concept of ...”

“... that a very innovative form was necessary to express them.’ She should, like Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, have experimented with form and language. I am not sure that this is so. The wild excesses of the novels flourish while, in the background, day-to-day realism plods on. That is their strength. As for her life with Caroline, Mazo considered that ...”