Ladies Almanack
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First published privately in Paris in 1928, Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes is a mischievous, richly illustrated portrait of the city’s lesbian artistic circle during the interwar years. Disguised as an old-fashioned almanac, complete with its calendar-like structure and mock-Elizabethan language, the book follows Dame Evangeline Musset, a charismatic benefactor modelled on the American writer and salon hostess Natalie Clifford Barney, as she presides over a world of female desire, romantic intrigue and unconventional loyalties. Barnes’s cast of vividly named characters draws on real figures from the Parisian avant-garde, transforming intimate friendships and rivalries into an irreverent blend of satire, folklore and affectionate caricature. Beneath its archaic diction and elaborate wordplay lies a spirited celebration of women who create lives and communities beyond the conventions of their age.
Playful, bawdy and formally audacious, Ladies Almanack offers a rare glimpse of queer literary Paris in the 1920s, written from within the circle it portrays rather than from the outside. Barnes parodies the moralising language of earlier literature while turning its conventions towards female sexuality, solidarity and self-determination. Privately printed and circulated among friends, the book remained little known to a wider readership for decades, but is now recognised as a distinctive work of modernism and a landmark of lesbian literature. Its compressed wit and deliberate obscurity reward a reader willing to linger over its strange, exuberant language—a small, singular chronicle of a world that refused to live by ordinary rules.
From the book
“Love in Man is Fear of Fear. Love in Woman is Hope without Hope.”
— Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack
On Ladies Almanack
“A striking lesbian manifesto and a deft parody.”
— Library Journal