LF281 Left Bank Lit: "Djuna Barnes," by Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood offers a very different but equally haunting vision of expatriate life in interwar Paris. Written after nearly a decade Barnes spent among the city’s avant-garde circles, the novel reflects the disquiet and disillusionment that underlay the glitter of the Left Bank.

First published in 1936 with an introduction by T. S. Eliot, Nightwood is a modernist masterpiece of lyrical density and emotional darkness. Set among a drifting cast of expatriates, aristocrats, and outcasts, it traces the doomed love affair between the American Nora Flood and the elusive Robin Vote, whose restlessness and ambiguity make her both irresistible and unknowable. Through long, baroque sentences and dreamlike imagery, Barnes captures a nocturnal Paris of desire, loss, and spiritual exile—far removed from Hemingway’s sunlit cafés. Her portrayal of sexual identity, alienation, and obsession was revolutionary for its time, and her uncompromising style influenced writers from William Burroughs to Jeanette Winterson.

Nightwood remains one of the most challenging and rewarding works to emerge from the Left Bank’s modernist experiment, a fevered echo of the same era that Hemingway immortalized in daylight.