From: The Review of Contemporary Fiction | Date: March 22, 1996| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1996 Review of Contemporary Fiction. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

An important gap in Barnes's published work is now filled with this splendid collection of her early plays. These sixteen one-acts were written between 1916 and 1923, when Barnes was in her late twenties and active with the Provincetown Players of New York (a group that included Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay). All but one were published in newspapers or magazines, a few were staged, but only two were ever published in book form (To the Dogs and The Dove, both in A Book [1923]). All of them display the distinctive style that would come to fruition in her novels: Augustan ...