Djuna Barnes, the renowned author of the modernist novel Nightwood, wrote three short stories under the pseudonym ‘Lydia Steptoe’. They appeared in different periodicals over three consecutive years in the 1920s; this is the first time they have been brought together as a set.
All written in ironic diary form, the Steptoe stories show Barnes at her wittiest and least self-consciously ‘literary’, a full decade before Nightwood was edited by T. S. Eliot and published by Faber.