Matthew O’Connor is a middle-aged, American-born student of medicine, specializing in gynecology. While on a visit to Berlin to see some performers whom he has befriended, Felix meets Matthew O’Connor (aka the doctor) at a salon gathering. In his adulthood, Felix moves to Paris and begins to feel a kinship with circus performers, many of whom take on titles of nobility in their stage names. Felix perpetuates the fraudulent claim to nobility and presents himself as Baron Felix Volkbein. Felix grows up under the care of an aunt who knows little of the family’s history. Felix’s father, Guido Volkbein, who died six months prior of a fever, was a man who falsely presented himself as a baron. She dies moments after, leaving him an orphan. The novel opens in a kind of flashback to 1880, as Baronin Hedvig Volkbein is giving birth to her son, Felix. Eliot published it, he described it as a novel which only “sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate.” And literally draw pictures.Stylistically, a defining characteristic of this novel is its dense poetic language, so much so that when T.S. 'She would find individuals, strange people - across class lines, race lines, across all sorts of social milieus - and kind of draw pictures for her audience. 'Part of the series that she did was called 'Odd types found in and around Brooklyn,' ' Morris tells NPR's Jacki Lyden. You could imagine some of her articles printed today in Vogue or The New Yorker. The newsprint and photographs on display are a bit faded, but Barnes' voice is still kicky. The story goes that Djuna Barnes - who grew up with her mother, grandmother, polygmaist father, his mistress and brothers she'd help support - walked into the office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and announced: 'I can draw, I can write, you'd be foolish not to hire me.'īarnes' whimsical drawings lent a satirical charm to her reporting. Morris is the curator of a new exhibition of Barnes' writings and illustrations called ' Newspaper Fictions' at the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Before publishing the plays and novels she's now known for, women's rights advocate Djuna Barnes was a journalist and illustrator.ĭjuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries

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