Given its traumatic beginnings, one might include ‘surprise’ among the affects produced by this book's ‘happy ending’. But this ‘ending’ is of course no such thing: by travelling non-chronologically from The Antiphon (1958) to Ladies Almanack (1928) through Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936), I hope to have honoured the queer relationship to time exhibited by Barnes's oeuvre. In Djuna Barnes the past is never history, but is apprehended in its full strangeness – and with all its possibilities for horror and delight – in the present tense. And besides, this work's emphasis on the unruliness of affect – on how affects combine in remarkable and unexpected ways – perhaps makes such ‘surprises’ altogether less surprising.

Through her enticing concept of erotohistoriography, where the lost object is encountered in the present and through the body, Elizabeth Freeman describes a mode of criticism which might allow us to ‘imagine ourselves haunted by bliss and not just by trauma: residues of positive affect (idylls, utopias, memories of touch) might be available for queer counter- (or para-) historiographies’ (2010: 120). We might well imagine Ladies Almanack as a form of erotohistoriography, as a text haunted by bliss, yet the reading practice I have elaborated throughout Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism in fact allows us to find traces of bliss within trauma and other kinds of negative experiences and feelings. Barnes's work illustrates the insight that affect is ‘born in in-between-ness and resides in accumulative beside-ness’ (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 2).