Lydia Steptoe Stories

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 a writer for our time.