A teenage girl raised off the grid in rural New York flees an arranged marriage, marches into a New York newspaper office, and declares that the editors would be fools not to hire her. That astonishing nerve launched Djuna Barnes, one of the most uncompromising figures of American modernist literature.

We follow her chaotic upbringing, her fearless immersive journalism, her years in bohemian Greenwich Village and 1920s Paris, her doomed romance with Thelma Wood, and the masterpiece it fueled. Her life reads as a reverse metamorphosis, ending in four decades of deliberate isolation at Patchin Place.

• The traumatic, boundaryless childhood that shaped her fierce cynicism
• Immersive stunt journalism, including voluntarily undergoing force-feeding
• Decoupling sexual freedom from motherhood in Greenwich Village
• The ...