From the wider cosmos to street level, from ‘Planets, Stars and Zones’, to ‘Petticoat Lane, just off Breach-String-Alley’, the ladies of Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack inhabit a world defined by joyful ebullience and bodily pleasure (76). The geographical emphasis is important: bliss is not ‘atopic’ as Roland Barthes claims in The Pleasure of the Text (1975), but rather Barnes suggests that happiness is ‘here’ within the very pages of her Almanack (23). Understood as a tribute to the lesbian community of 1920s expatriate Paris, a sapphic roman à clef depicting Natalie Barney and the women who attended her salons at 20 rue Jacob, Barnes's work playfully adopts and adapts the form of an early modern astrological almanac. The Almanack recounts the lifelong exploits of Dame Evangeline Musset – a rakish adventuress generally understood to be based on Barney – but also serves as a mock treatise on lesbian sexuality and woman's pleasure.