by Djuna Barnes
A mock almanac about the lesbian circle around the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney in 1920s Paris, written by Djuna Barnes in deliberately archaic English, printed privately in 1928 and sold by hand.
A joke almanac, laid out month by month like the farming calendars sold in country shops, about the women who gathered at Natalie Clifford Barney's salon in Paris in the 1920s. Djuna Barnes wrote it in a mock-Elizabethan English full of capital letters and archaic spellings, and published it anonymously as the work of "a lady of fashion". Its subject is women who desire women, and it is explicit about that from its first page. The central figure is Dame Evangeline Musset, an invented character who rescues women in distress, dispenses advice from a tea table, and is canonised as a saint in the book's third chapter. Nearly everyone else is a thinly disguised portrait of a real woman in Barney's circle. It runs to about seventeen thousand words and was printed in an edition of a thousand-odd copies that never went through a bookshop.
The book takes the form it is named after. A traditional almanac gave a farmer the months, the moon's phases, the saints' days and a page of remedies; Djuna Barnes keeps that skeleton and fills it with the sexual weather of a specific group of women. January introduces the one woman in the book who does not understand any of it. February is a love letter. "Saints Days" canonises the heroine month by month, one feat per month. The rest of the year runs through signs and symptoms, portents, distempers, tides and moons, love philtres, and finally a death and a funeral.
The women in it were real and most of them knew it. The circle met at Natalie Clifford Barney's house at 20 rue Jacob in Paris, where Barney had been holding a salon since 1909, and Barnes wrote her friends into the book under names that describe them: a Stetson, a monocle, a surgical voice. Barnes never published a key, and the identifications come from the circle itself and from later scholarship rather than from the author. The best attested is the central one — Dame Evangeline Musset is Barney.
The prose is the obstacle and the point. Barnes wrote in a pastiche of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English, capitalising nouns at random, using "an" for "if", and building sentences that run for half a page before they land. Read quickly it is impenetrable. Read at the speed of a person reading aloud it is mostly filthy jokes, and the archaism is the disguise that lets the jokes through.
It was not sold in shops. About 1,050 copies were printed privately in Paris in 1928, Barnes hand-coloured the illustrations in the first fifty, and copies were passed among friends and, by several accounts, sold on the street. Barnes's name is not on it. The book stayed out of general circulation until Harper & Row reprinted it in 1972, and Barnes, who by then had spent decades refusing to discuss it, was not enthusiastic about the attention.
January sets up the joke by introducing the sceptic. Patience Scalpel, an invented character, belongs to the almanac for one reason: she cannot understand what the women around her see in each other. She asks the question repeatedly and never gets an answer she accepts, and she is the only voice in the book that speaks for ordinary marriage and children.
February is a single unbroken love letter, addressed to a woman who has been loved by everyone already, worrying that there is no new way left to do it. "Saints Days" then canonises Dame Evangeline Musset, the book's heroine, with one entry per month of her life: what she managed at five, at nine, at fifteen, at twenty-one, at thirty, at fifty, at eighty-eight.
March brings two Englishwomen to Musset's tea table. Lady Buck-and-Balk wears a monocle and believes in spirits; Tilly-Tweed-In-Blood wears a Stetson and believes in marriage, and wants the House of Lords to legalise weddings between women so that alimony can be collected when one of them strays. Musset suggests duelling instead. They are joined by Masie Tuck-and-Frill, a midwife who has run out of work and still checks hopefully between the sheets, and by Patience Scalpel, who arrives, throws off her furs and asks whether there is a man about the place.
The middle months work as an almanac proper. April lists the symptoms of the condition, from the giggling of the early stages to the acute melancholy of the advanced. June is a poem of portents. July reproduces the letters women in love write to each other and then despairs of them. August catalogues the distempers, including the woman who cannot stop telling the neighbourhood what she did last night. September argues that jealousy between women has no excuse to hide behind, since no question of a child's paternity arises, and is therefore more honest and no less painful.
October is the book's one sustained portrait of an unwanted admirer: Daisy Downpour, a corset-maker, who stands at her window every autumn dropping a linen rose into Musset's garden and waiting for a signal that never comes. November sends Musset out through the town to give away the wisdom she has finally acquired at fifty, and nobody will stop to listen. December is her funeral.
Lady Buck-and-Balk sported a Monocle and believed in Spirits. Tilly-Tweed-In-Blood sported a Stetson, and believed in Marriage.
Patience Scalpel was of this Month, and belongs to this Almanack for one Reason only, that from Beginning to End, Top to Bottom, inside and out, she could not understand Women and their Ways as they were about her, above her and before her.
Love in Man is Fear of Fear. Love in Woman is Hope without Hope.
Most accounts of [Natalie Clifford Barney](person:natalie-barney)'s salon were written later, by outsiders, or by people settling scores. This one was written by a regular, for the regulars, while it was going on, and handed to them in person.
The reputation of the 1920s avant-garde is for difficulty. This is a book of dirty jokes about a real group of friends, dressed in three-hundred-year-old English so that the printer would set it and the post office would carry it.
Seventeen thousand words, and in the United States public domain since 2024. It is the least demanding way to find out what [Djuna Barnes](person:djuna-barnes) sounds like before starting [Nightwood](work:nightwood).
The book's heroine — a wealthy Englishwoman of fifty who rescues women in distress, holds court at a tea table, and is canonised as a saint a third of the way through.
The one woman in the book who does not desire women, and cannot work out what everybody else is doing. She gets the first chapter and the last word.
An Englishwoman with a monocle who believes in spirits, and who wants the House of Lords to make weddings between women legal.
The other Englishwoman at the tea table — a Stetson, a firm belief in marriage, and the loudest sympathy in the book.
A midwife whose trade has disappeared, still hoping that two women will one day need her services. The book's prophet, and its softest voice.
The one the others chase and the one Dame Musset keeps. She interrupts, she exclaims, and she tells the story of Sheba and Jezebel.
A corset-maker who spends ten years at her window dropping a linen rose into Dame Musset's garden, waiting for a signal that never comes.
One of two sisters who bring Dame Musset the gossip. She works in journalism, cannot let a morsel go, and knows exactly what her sister is going to do next.
The other sister — sent to fetch a woman back and found sitting far too close to her instead. She falls in love constantly and recovers fast.
1909
Natalie Clifford Barney begins holding a salon at 20 rue Jacob in Paris. The circle that gathers there over the next two decades becomes the book's cast.
1927
Barnes writes the almanac, by her own later account partly to amuse Thelma Wood, the American sculptor she was living with in Paris.
1928
Printed privately in Paris in about 1,050 copies, credited to "a lady of fashion". Barnes hand-colours the illustrations in the first fifty. The same year, her novel Ryder is published in New York.
1972
Harper & Row issues the first general edition, forty-four years after the private printing, and Barnes's authorship becomes public property.
1992
New York University Press publishes a scholarly edition with an introduction by Susan Sniader Lanser.
2024
The book enters the United States public domain, and Dalkey Archive reissues it.
Barnes's other 1928 book, published the same year in New York. It uses the same trick of writing modern material in old-fashioned English, and it too was censored — though by a commercial publisher rather than avoided by private printing.
Read our take
The novel Barnes is known for, published nine years later. It is the serious book to this one's joke, and readers who arrive at Barnes through Nightwood are usually startled by how funny she could be.
Read our take
[James Joyce](person:james-joyce)'s novel, printed in Paris in 1922 by a bookshop owner because no ordinary publisher would touch it. It is the model for what Barnes did in 1928: print privately, sell by hand, and let the book find its readers without a distributor.
Read our take
[Gertrude Stein](person:gertrude-stein)'s short book of prose poems, another difficult small volume from a woman running a Paris salon. Stein and Barney were rivals in the same city, and their two salons drew overlapping crowds.
Read our takeDjuna Barnes, the American writer and illustrator who spent the 1920s in Paris and later wrote the novel Nightwood. She published it anonymously in 1928, crediting only "a lady of fashion", and did not put her name to it for decades.
The lesbian circle around the American writer Natalie Clifford Barney in 1920s Paris, written as a parody of a farmer's almanac with a chapter for each month. Its heroine, Dame Evangeline Musset, is an invented character who rescues women in distress and is canonised as a saint partway through.
She is a fictional character, but she is drawn directly from Natalie Clifford Barney, the American heiress and writer who ran a salon at 20 rue Jacob in Paris from 1909. Barnes never published a key to the book; the identification comes from people in the circle and from later scholarship, and it is the firmest one in the book.
It is a deliberate imitation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printing, with nouns capitalised mid-sentence and archaic spellings throughout. The old-fashioned surface is what lets the book be as explicit as it is, and it is also the joke: a genuinely obscene book dressed as a household almanac.
Privately, in Paris in 1928, in an edition of about 1,050 copies that was never offered to bookshops. Barnes hand-coloured the illustrations in the first fifty copies, and copies circulated among friends; several accounts describe them being sold on the street. The first general edition did not appear until Harper & Row reprinted it in 1972.
In the United States, yes, since 1 January 2024, when works published in 1928 entered the public domain. Dalkey Archive reissued it that year.
It is the shorter and lighter of the two and gives a fair sample of Barnes's sentences, so it works as an introduction. It is not a rehearsal for Nightwood, though: that novel is bleak where this one is bawdy.
