Miss Barnes is one of those few writers whose thought and expression become more felicitous, the more painful the theme she is dealing with; [in Nightwood] she resembles Webster and Baudelaire. There is no trace of a hopeful or even a hopeinspiring philosophy in her book: her vision is purely tragic, with that leavening of sardonic wit which comes from long familiarity with tragedy: the almost professional note which one also finds in Webster and Baudelaire, but which, though a source of pleasure in itself, does not alleviate in the least the force of the tragic emotion. Miss Barnes's prose is the only prose by a living writer which can be compared with that of Joyce, and in one point it is superior to his: in its richness in exact and vivid imagery entirely without that prettiness which so readily creeps into an Irish style. There is not...