The commitments made by these women to professional editing and publishing, which involved considerable financial risk and hard physical labour, offer an alternative impression to the continuing legend that Paris expatriates spent their days in cafes and their nights in Montparnasse bars. 'The political implications of women's involvement in publication have not often been acknowledged. Sylvia Beach opens her bookstore Shakespeare and Company at 8 rue Dupuytren Edwards (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 224. America was clearly the down side of this arrangement.”īonnie Kime Scott, 'Djuna Barnes’s Migratory Modernism', American Modernism Across the Arts, ed. In the midst of her 1929 trip to New York, Barnes reported to Barney with great self-satisfaction that she was doing 8 articles, would turn to 8 other pieces in short order, and was lining up 2 articles at Vanity Fair. The 3 month sojourn in New York was to make money, a strategy advised by Barney. Café and street cultures afforded the opportunity to encounter a succession of eccentric characters. In Paris she could do the work that interested her and be with a largely American group of creative people who openly expressed various sexualities. … she planned an annual cycle of 9 months in Paris and 3 in New York City.

In 1927 “Barnes bought an apartment that she cherished at 9 rue St. Djuna Barnes' apartment in the rue St-Romain

John glassco memoirs of montparnasse