She was a familiar figure in Greenwich Village and Left Bank literary and lesbian circles during the teens, twenties, and thirties. Admired by her contemporaries for her wickedly incisive wit as well as for her great beauty and style, Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) consorted with the likes of Berenice Abbott, Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Natalie Barney, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Kay Boyle, Emily Coleman, Ezra Pound, and Dag Hammarskjold. T. S. Eliot, who was among her greatest admirers, sponsored the publication of Barnes's most famous work, the novel Nightwood. Yet even in her lifetime Djuna Barnes's fanatic privacy made her the most elusive of modern writers. At last, Joyce scholar Phillip Herring has written a sensitive and lively in-depth portrait of the woman Dylan Thomas considered one of our greatest female novelists.
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