The unsigned reader report for Djuna Barnes’s three-act play, Biography of Julie van Bartmann, strikes a note of hesitant praise that would become all too familiar to the author when dealing with publishers and editors in the coming decades:

An ‘eloquent and revealing commentary on the more passionate zone of life’ (Barnes 1924: n.p.), the play presents the narrative of a world-famous opera singer, Julie van Bartmann, paying a visit to a small American farmstead run by an eccentric and visionary farmer named Basil Born, along with his children Gart, Gustava and Costa. Despite the mixture of admiration and ambivalence in the reader’s report, the play was neither published nor performed in Barnes’s lifetime. Her first novel, Ryder (1928), also set on a farm under the rule of an unconventional patriarch, Wendell Ryder, recycled material from Biography of Julie van Bartmann and garnered a similar mixed reception. When her editor at Boni and Liveright, Donald S. Friede, read it, he complained that he ‘did not like it half as much as [he had] expected to’, voicing his disapproval of its collage of literary ‘effects’ and fearing that it might be ‘the type of book whose sale is purely problematical’ (Friede 1927: n.p.). And when, in the 1950s, Barnes once again mined material from her childhood to be reimagined within her drama The Antiphon, T. S. Eliot continued the trend. On receiving a typescript of the play in 1954, he explained that he was struggling to comprehend both its language and its plot, and felt it to be extremely obscure.