The Lydia Steptoe Stories

Faber Stories

Djuna Barnes

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571354672
• Year: 2019

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

'I have quite changed my mind. I am going to run away and become a boy.'

In these three stories, written by Djuna Barnes under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, three characters find themselves on the brink of a sexual awakening - accompanied by guns, whips, and worldly innuendo.

A fourteen-year-old girl plans to become 'a virago', until her mother intercepts her first tryst by dressing up as her male lover. A boy of the same age is lured into the forest by his father's mistress. A woman of forty falls in love and longs to kill herself, so unbearable is the return of the youth she thought she wanted. 'Alice', she tells herself, 'be a man.'

Barnes makes gender and desire seem slippery and joyful - and makes the fictional Lydia Steptoe seem like a writer for our time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• The Lydia Steptoe Stories
• About Faber Stories
• About the Author
• Copyright