Zadel, who believed her son was a misunderstood artistic genius, struggled to provide for the entire family, supplementing her diminishing income by writing begging letters to friends and acquaintances.

Barnes wrote "If I, play acting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits."

[18] Among her social circle were Edmund Wilson, Berenice Abbott, and the Dadaist artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose biography Barnes tried to write but never finished.

Bruno had a reputation for unscrupulousness, and was often accused of exploiting Greenwich Village residents for profit—he used to charge tourists admission to watch Bohemians paint—but he was a strong opponent of censorship and was willing to risk prosecution by publishing Barnes's 1915 collection of "rhythms and drawings"[26] Despite a description of sex between women in the first poem, the book was never legally challenged; the passage seems explicit now, but at a time when lesbianism was virtually invisible in American culture, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice may not have understood its imagery.

Yet it played a significant role in the development of American drama, featuring works by Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, and Theodore Dreiser, as well as launching the career of Eugene O'Neill.

In the 1930s she told Antonia White that "she had no feeling of guilt whatever about sex, about going to bed with any man or woman she wanted";[34] correspondence indicates that by the time she was 21 her family was well aware of her bisexuality,[35] and she had a number of affairs with both men and women during her Greenwich Village years.

She interviewed her fellow expatriate writers and artists for U.S. periodicals and soon became a well-known figure on the local scene; her black cloak and her acerbic wit are remembered in many memoirs of the time.

[38] She was part of the inner circle of the influential salon hostess Natalie Barney, who became a lifelong friend and patron, as well as the central figure in Barnes's satiric chronicle of Paris lesbian life, Ladies Almanack.

Wood was a Kansas native who had come to Paris to become a sculptor, but at Barnes's suggestion took up silverpoint instead, producing drawings of animals and plants that one critic compared to Henri Rousseau.

The headline of her Vanity Fair interview billed him as "the man who is, at present, one of the more significant figures in literature," but her personal reaction to Ulysses was less guarded: "I shall never write another line ... Who has the nerve to after that?

"[42] It may have been reading Joyce that led Barnes to turn away from the late 19th century Decadent and Aesthetic influences of The Book of Repulsive Women toward the modernist experimentation of her later work.

The move made them neighbors of Mina Loy, a friend of Barnes's since Greenwich Village days, who appeared in Ladies Almanack as Patience Scalpel, the sole heterosexual character, who "could not understand Women and their Ways.

A bookseller, Edward Titus, offered to carry Ladies Almanack in his store in exchange for being mentioned on the title page, but when he demanded a share of the royalties on the entire print run, Barnes was furious.

"[48] Wood had a worsening dependency on alcohol, and she spent her nights drinking and seeking out casual sex partners; Barnes would search the cafés for her, often winding up equally drunk.

The play drew heavily on her own family history, and the writing was fueled by anger; she said "I wrote The Antiphon with clenched teeth, and I noted that my handwriting was as savage as a dagger.

She wrote eight hours per day despite a growing list of health problems, including arthritis so severe that she had difficulty even sitting at her typewriter or turning on her desk lamp.

"[61] Bertha Harris put roses in her mailbox, but never succeeded in meeting her; Carson McCullers camped on her doorstep, but Barnes only called down "Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away.

The setting is New York City, and the subjects are all women: a cabaret singer, a woman seen through an open window from the elevated train, and, in the last poem, the corpses of two suicides in the morgue.

[70] Both Ryder and Ladies Almanack abandon the Beardsleyesque style of her drawings for The Book of Repulsive Women in favor of a visual vocabulary borrowed from French folk art.

Several illustrations are closely based on the engravings and woodcuts collected by Pierre Louis Duchartre and René Saulnier in the 1926 book L'Imagerie Populaire—images that had been copied with variations since medieval times.

Postal Service to refuse to ship it, and several had to be left out of the first edition, including an image in which Sophia is seen urinating into a chamberpot and one in which Amelia and Kate-Careless sit by the fire knitting codpieces.

"[73] "[A] Pioneer and a Menace" in her youth, Dame Musset has reached "a witty and learned Fifty";[74] she rescues women in distress, dispenses wisdom, and upon her death is elevated to sainthood.

Also appearing pseudonymously are Élisabeth de Gramont, Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde, Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, and Mina Loy.

[75] The obscure language, inside jokes, and ambiguity of Ladies Almanack have kept critics arguing about whether it is an affectionate satire or a bitter attack, but Barnes loved the book and reread it throughout her life.

They take advantage of Jeremy's absence to don animal masks and assault both women, making cruel and sexually suggestive remarks; Augusta treats this attack as a game.

[82] When Augusta hears Elisha and Dudley driving away, she blames Miranda for their abandonment and beats her to death with a curfew bell, falling dead at her side from the exertion.

The format suggests a children's book, but it contains enough allusiveness and advanced vocabulary to make it an unlikely read for a child: the entry for T quotes Blake's "The Tyger", a seal is compared to Jacques-Louis David's portrait of Madame Récamier, and a braying donkey is described as "practicing solfeggio."

Creatures continues the themes of nature and culture found in Barnes's earlier work, and their arrangement as a bestiary reflects her longstanding interest in systems for organizing knowledge, such as encyclopedias and almanacs.

[84] Barnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Karen Blixen, John Hawkes, Bertha Harris, Dylan Thomas, David Foster Wallace, and Anaïs Nin.

[85] Barnes's biographical notes and collection of manuscripts have been a major source for scholars who have brought the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven forth from the margins of Dada history.