The Ladies Almanack

By: Djuna Barnes

Nearly 100 years after its original 1928 publication sent shockwaves through the literary scene, Ladies Almanack reigns as a brilliant modernist composition and one of the most audacious lesbian texts of the 20^th century. At once a scathing social satire and a love letter to the wealthy expatriates of Paris high society, the book delights in its cast of characters, who are clear analogues to Barnes’ lesbian literary contemporaries—and the book’s first readers.

Arranged by month and written in a pastiche of Restoration literature, Ladies Almanack records the life and lovers of Dame Evangeline Musset, a pseudonymous stand-in for Natalie Clifford Barney. Accompanied for the first time by Barnes’ original Elizabethan-style woodcut illustrations, this new edition also features a sharp, impassioned introduction by Sarah Schulman reflecting on the ways in which lesbian lives have changed—and haven’t—since the 1920s. After decades out of print, Dalkey Archive is proud to revive the Ladies Almanack for contemporary readers: a classic that delivers all the salacious drama of The L Word with the literary wit and wordplay of Shakespeare.

Continuing her pattern of writing extraordinary books that defy the traditional boundaries of literary form, Djuna Barnes’ The Ladies Almanack is an experimental roman à clef written for and about a community of Parisian lesbians. Unapologetically puzzling, the novel is a celebration of queerness in form and function, often considered to be one of the boldest pieces of lesbian literature ever published.

“…all Ladies should carry about with them [this almanack], 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!”

Unquestionably unique in its execution of narrative, Djuna Barnes’ The Ladies Almanack is an experimental roman à clef that intertwines fiction, myth, and parody into one of the boldest pieces of lesbian literature published in the twentieth century.

Privately printed and distributed by Barnes herself, the novel is considered by many to be the love letter—and inside joke—to the lesbian community that flourished in the literary salon of American writer, Natalie Clifford Barney; with many in the circle appearing pseudonymously within the text.

Confounding both critics and readers alike for almost a century, The Ladies Almanack is an unabashedly puzzling book that exists on its own terms; unapologetically delighting its first audience, confusing it’s expanded audience, and celebrating all that lesbianism was and can be.