Rare proof copy
BARNES, Djuna. Nightwood. London: Faber and Faber. 1936.
8vo. Original yellow card covers lettered in black; pp. [vi], 9-259; vertical creasing along darkened spine with minimal compression to spine tips but internally fine; a very good copy.
Proof copy of a defining Lesbian classic.
"A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own...".
Published in 1936 by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, Nightwood explores the love-lives of a group of Americans and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s – an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. It is one of the earliest novels to explicitly portray queer lives. In his preface to the 1937 Harcourt and Brace edition, Eliot wrote of "[t]he great achievement of [its] style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."
Eliot prefaced the Harcourt and Brace 1937 edition and would enthusiastically promoe, with the two authors exchanging intense communication over the years. Of its often-extravagant language, T.S. Eliot would remark that it resembled that of an Elizabethan tragedy in his introduction and encouraged two readings of Nightwood in order to understand its true intricate layering.
While Jeanette Winterson, in her introduction to the 2007 Faber Modern Classics Edition (seventy years after Eliot's preface) describes Nightwood as "its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass".
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