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Product Description
"Now this be a Tale of as fine a Wench as ever wet Bed . . . Thus begins this Almanack, which all Ladies should carry about with them, as the Priest his Breviary, as the Cook his Recipes, as the Doctor his Physic, as the Bride her Fears, and as the Lion his Roar!" Barnes's affectionate lampoon of the expatriate lesbian community in Paris was privately printed in 1928. Arranged by month, it records the life and loves of Dame Evangeline Musset (modeled after salon hostess Natalie Barney) in a robust style taken from Shakespeare and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and is illustrated throughout with Barnes's own drawings.
This new edition is a facsimile of the 1928 edition with the addition of an afterword providing details on the book's origins and a key to its real-life models.
Amazon.com Review
Djuna Barnes must have had great fun writing and illustrating this book. It's a lively lampoon of her lesbian chums of Left Bank Paris in the 1920s. The main character, Dame Evangeline Musset, is based on the notorious dyke Natalie Barney. Structured as a month-by-month almanac in a style that owes as much to Shakespeare's comedies as to any literature of the intervening centuries, Barnes's book follows the Dame's amorous, often naughty, adventures.
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