The grande-dameish tone of Djuna Barnes's letter to Edwin Muir, in which she emphatically situates her ‘bleeding’ modernism outside the institutional body of the Bollingen Foundation, is typical of her later correspondence. A glamorous yet cantankerous representative of Left-Bank expatriate life, the Djuna Barnes one encounters in modernist life-writing has rather a lot in common with Nightwood's melancholic, cross-dressing, unlicensed gynaecologist Dr Matthew O'Connor. Like her doctor, Barnes deploys her melodrama with camp flourish. And equally, both the biographical Barnes and her literary oeuvre support O'Connor's somatic conception of feeling, his deliberate conjunction of psychic pain and embodied experience. Barnes's writing forces us to remember that reading engages the body: in both quotations she invites us to smile with delight and gasp with horror. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism argues that these mixed feelings are central to Barnes's aesthetically and politically challenging oeuvre. In works that allow us to further comprehend the variousness of the modernist project, Djuna Barnes describes how affects circulate between bodies – and between texts and bodies – in ways at once generative and disruptive.