T.S. Eliot had only two pictures in his office at the publishing house of Faber and Faber. One was of Groucho Marx. The other was of Djuna Barnes.

Eliot was Barnes’s publisher and editor, and it was Eliot who wrote the introduction to her novel, “Nightwood,” which was also admired by James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway named Jake Barnes of “The Sun Also Rises” after Barnes, who, when she was in Paris, lived at the Hotel Jacob.He said of her, with uncharacteristic hyperbole, that “she dominated the intellectual night-life of Europe for a century.” And Dylan Thomas felt that “Nightwood” was “one of the three great prose works ever written by a woman.”

This year marks two 70th anniversaries: the publication of “Nightwood” and the founding of New Directions Press, its original American publisher. In honor of both occasions, New Directions has issued a new edition, which retains the Eliot introduction and adds an additional preface by the novelist Jeanette Winterson.

Barnes was born in 1892 in Cornwallon-Hudson, N.Y., but her family moved to a farm on Long Island when she was a child. She had an unconventional upbringing, to say the least. Her father was a writer and artist, who always had a mistress sharing the house with his wife and children. It is suspected that Barnes’s father raped her as a child and that she also had incestuous relations with her grandmother.

She escaped from home in 1911. In New York City, the previously homeschooled Barnes had her only formal schooling at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Art Students League. Soon she began submitting articles to the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Tribune, and the New York Press, illustrating them with her own drawings done in the manner of Aubrey Beardsley.

Margaret Anderson published several of Barnes’s early short stories in her legendary magazine, the Little Review. Her early support enabled Barnes to move from journalism to poetry and fiction, though their relationship was always uneasy. Barnes also wrote plays, and her early work was performed by the Provincetown Players. She appeared on a double bill with Eugene O’Neill and reportedly told him that she thought herself the better playwright. Her early satiric poems lampooning the lesbian community, “The Book of Repulsive Women”(1915) created a scandal and increased her reputation, as did her autobiographical novel, “Ryder” (1928).

Barnes had a devastating wit. To a hyperkinetic member of Peggy Guggenheim’s entourage she said, “You would be marvelous company slightly stunned.” Barnes was a striking woman, and attracted a score of admirers, ranging from Putzi Hanfstaengl to Edmund Wilson. Hanfstaengl, who later became well known as a member of Hitler’s entourage, became so excited while dancing with her that he burst a blood vessel in his penis. Wilson suggested that they should run off and live together in Italy, which caused her to double over with hysterical laughter.

In the 1920s Barnes moved to Paris where she met the sculptor Thelma Wood. For the next decade they had a tormented and tormenting relationship. Compared to the volatile Wood, the emotionally scarred Barnes was the pillar of psychic stability. Wood often went out at night in search of amorous adventure, and Barnes, though she had many affairs of her own during their relationship, was plagued by jealousy when Wood did. Barnes would frequently go out in search of Wood, and the two would return home drunk, exhausted, and swearing unending love to each other. Barnes was once quoted as saying, “I am not a lesbian, but I loved Thelma.”

Nevertheless, almost all her affairs after Thelma and during Thelma were with women, including those with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Guggenheim. She stayed at Guggenheim’s house in England after she left France and Thelma, and it was there that she wrote “Nightwood.”

“Nightwood” is Barnes’s transformation of her relationship with Wood into art. It is the story of Robin Vote and the people whose lives she has destroyed. These include her husband, Baron Felix Volkbein, their son Guido, Nora Flood — the Barnes character — and Jenny Petherbridge. Robin leaves Felix for Nora and Nora for Jenny.In Barnes’s characterization Jenny is a “squatter” who thinks other people’s thoughts and feels other’s emotions, because she has none of her own. Robin leaves them all desolate.

To me they are all insubstantial characters, none of them taking on a fictional life. Even Ms. Winterson, in her glowing preface, describes the story as “slight” and the characters as “magnificent tricks of the light.” An exception is the unlicensed “doctor,” Matthew O’Connor, or as he swaggeringly styles himself, “Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’- Connor.” In all likelihood an abortionist, he is a great and compassionate figure, whose monologues and conversation are like verbal arias.Barnes was a mannered and ornate writer, but in O’Connor’s monologues her language reached a level as magnificent as the great organ tone of Jacobean prose.

In the chapter “Watchman, what of the night?” Nora Flood goes to O’Connor’s apartment for consolation and finds him in full makeup, a blonde wig, and a nightgown, clearly expecting someone else. She asks him to explain the lure that the night has for Robin, and her own emotional desolation. “What am I to do?” she says.

It is impossible to do justice to the cumulative effect of his lunatic grandiloquence, but this is a sample:

Ah, mighty uncertainty!… Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs all approaching or leaving their misplaced mousemeat that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.

The language is not always comprehensible, but like music it moves us in ways that defy rational thought. “Nightwood” is sui generis, exploring some of the more bizarre byways of life. It is, in its way, quite beautiful.

To say, however, that “Nightwood” could stand on the same shelf with “Ulysses” or “The Wasteland,” as some have claimed, as one of the great works of Modernism, is a stretch. It is a slender work, however grand its prose. And yet, I find myself strangely haunted by Nora’s visit to Dr. O’Connor.

Djuna Barnes returned to the United States and lived the last 40 years of her life in a one-room apartment in Patchin Place in the Village, a virtual recluse, supported by an allowance from Guggenheim until her death at 90,completing only one more work, a verse play, “The Antiphon,” which was largely impenetrable — though no less a light than Dag Hammarskjöld, at the time the Secretary-General of the United Nations, admired it and translated it into Swedish.

Mr. Volkmer last wrote for these pages about the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke.