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..."
Nightwood is considered a masterpiece of transgressive Modernist literature, being one of the earliest noteworthy novels to portray queer relationships and, explicitly, female homosexuality. With Dylan Thomas describing Nightwood as "one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman", it is famously experimental in form and delves deep into the lives of a medley of intricate characters revelling in 1930s Paris, some based on Barnes' own life, including her turbulant relationship with the sculptor Thelma Wood. The writer herself boldly refutes and subverts all classical expectations of prose, placing strict emphasis on unusual, non-linear structure and indulgent imagery in the very same way the writer's exiled personalities are torn in their striking efforts to exist.
Eliot prefaced the Harcourt and Brace 1937 edition and would enthusiastically pioneer its publicity, with the two exchanging intense commuication over the years. Of its often extravagent 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.
The influential Jeanette Winterson would beautifully encapsulate the novel for the Faber and Faber's Modern Classics Edition of Nightwood in 2007 as such: "Nightwood is itself. It is 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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