📱 eBook en inglés THE LYDIA STEPTOE STORIES

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

I have quite changed my mind. I am going to run away and become a boy.

In these three stories, written by Djuna Barnes under the pseudonym Lydia Steptoe, three characters find themselves on the brink of a sexual awakening - accompanied by guns, whips, and worldly innuendo.

A fourteen-year-old girl plans to become a virago, until her mother intercepts her first tryst by dressing up as her male lover. A boy of the same age is lured into the forest by his fathers mistress. A woman of forty falls in love and longs to kill herself, so unbearable is the return of the youth she thought she wanted. Alice, she tells herself, be a man.

Barnes makes gender and desire seem slippery and joyful - and makes the fictional Lydia Steptoe seem like a writer for our time.