Grande Malade, The. Corrected typescript.
7 pp. typed on onionskin paper with manuscript corrections in black ink in Barnes' hand, and copy editor’s corrections in green and red ink. 11 x 8-3/4 in. 5 Patchin Place, New York II. N.Y., U.S.A: n.d., ca. 1962. Loose pages fastened by pin at upper left corner, with slight rust mark.
Original corrected typescript of Barnes' short story "La Grande Malade," first published as "The Little Girl Continues" in the periodical This Quarter I (Paris, 1925) and reworked and retitled here for publication in The Selected Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962). A typed "note to the editor" on the title leaf gives the first publication erroneously as "in an anthology edited by Peter Neagoe called Americans Abroad at Servire Press, The Hague, 1932." "La Grande Malade" evidently underwent further revision after this draft, as it differs some from the final published version. "The Grande Malade" is the second of Barnes' "little girl" stories, in which a young female narrator speaks to an older lady ("Madame"). The first of these, "A Little Girl Tells a Story to a Lady," was first published in 1925 and later retitled "Cassation" for inclusion in the 1962 Selected Works. Barnes scholar Carolyn Allen argues in "Writing Towards Nightwood: Djuna Barnes' Seduction Stories" (in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, Southern Illinois University, 1991) that the "little girl" stories are important works of "lesbian imagination" that lead directly to Barnes' masterpiece, Nightwood.
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