After a successful career in New York as a journalist and playwright, novelist Djuna Barnes arrived in Paris in 1919. She became a much-talked-about figure of 1920s Paris, well known among other expatriate writers and a favorite of Natalie Barney’s salon. In 1928, her renown increased with the publication of her openly lesbian book, Ladies Almanack, her literary rendition of the gatherings at Barney’s salon. One of Barnes’s closest friends was the poet, designer, and painter Mina Loy. As a young woman, Loy studied painting in Munich and Paris, exhibiting work in the 1905 Salon d’Automne show. In the 1900s, Loy and her husband moved to Florence, where they became frequent guests at Mabel Dodge’s Villa Curonia. American expatriates that Loy met there encouraged her to write and helped her publish her free verse poetry in American magazines. Over the next years, Loy lived in New York and Paris, where she wrote poetry, painted, and designed costumes, theatrical sets, lampshades, and her own inventions. Loy became an enigmatic and admired figure among the literary sets of New York and Paris. Marianne Moore described her in a poem as having “hair, the tails of two / fighting cocks” and with “eyes, flowers of ice and snow,”1 while Djuna Barnes included a character based on Loy in Ladies Almanack – Patience Scalpel, the only heterosexual woman in a lesbian community. Harriet Monroe once wrote of Loy, “Yes, poetry is in this lady whether she writes it or not.”2