Ryder

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When it was first published in 1928, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, a bawdy mock-Elizabethan chronicle of a family very much like her own, was described in the Saturday Review as "the most amazing book ever written by a woman." One of modern literature's first and best denunciations of patriarchal repression, Ryder employs an exuberant prose by which narrator Julie Ryder derides her hated father, polygamous Wendell Ryder. Barnes satirizes masculinity and domesticity by way of parable, poem, and play, and a prose style that echoes Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. For this edition, several of Barnes's previously suppressed illustrations have been restored, and novelist Paul West has contributed a perceptive afterword.

"Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be—vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad—a bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand." (The Argonaut)

"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us." (Eugene Jolas, transition)

"Barnes dresses the page, as only she can do, in a remarkably flexible array of words, now Elizabethan, now Biblical in tone, shifting in genre from narrative to poetry to drama to parable. Her ability to control the exuberant interaction of these elements produces a text in which women's voices and that ever-so-tricky business of 'female experience' come to the fore fully on their own terms." (WLW Journal Winter 91)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING