The “Lost Girls” of the Yellow Book*

   Jad Adams’s Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives tells the story of the Yellow Book, a magazine that was “a force and famous” during the late nineteenth century in England. Here I quote writer-musician Elizabeth Pennell, who was associated with this magazine named for its signature hue. Scholars of Aestheticism and Decadence as well as historians and literary critics interested in late-Victorian culture more broadly have long recognized the centrality of this magazine for the period. Adams’s distinctive approach is to conceptualize his study of the Yellow Book as a group biography focused on the journal’s most courted contributor, the woman writer. In its best moments, this book brings a vibrant world to life, articulating in readable fashion the artistic and cultural mission that animated that world. Evelyn Sharp’s effusion—“I knew it was very heaven to be young when I came to London in the nineties”—captures the sense of novelty, wonder, and promise in the air that fueled the enterprise of this vanguard magazine. Aiming to people a world, Decadent Women explores the network of connections that sustained that world. Adams’s readers will learn about the lives and writings of individual authors, set in the intellectually vibrant milieu they inhabited. The first chapter of the book journeys back 130 years, focusing on the launch of the magazine in April 1894. We quickly come to appreciate the key involvement in the magazine of George Egerton, the “keynote” writer of the 1890s. We learn of the magazine’s backstory situated in early conversations among editor Henry Harland, publisher John Lane, and others. Though Adams’s study is primarily interested in the magazine’s female authors, the men important to the enterprise emerge into view, too: from Harland with his well-attended “at homes” to partners Lane and Elkin Mathews who, from 1892-94, ran The Bodley Head together. The inaugural issue of the Yellow Book featured three women writers: Egerton, Pearl Craigie, and Ella D’Arcy, who would become the magazine’s most frequent contributor during its run. Of this first issue’s 15 images, 11 depicted female figures. Articles contributed by male writers tended to feature “female-centered” themes—appropriately, here is where “A Defence of Cosmetics,” Max Beerbohm’s insouciant tribute to beauty, appeared. Henry James also signed on to contribute a piece; his fame and imprimatur (along with that of Egerton) virtually guaranteed success for the magazine’s debut issue. The first edition of 5,000 sold out in five days. Within 12 days following the launch dinner, Harland was able to promise the public a fourth edition already in press. Ethel Colburn Mayne, who worked for Harland, provides the book’s most moving paean to a magazine that sought “a perception that penetrated beyond the surface of things and people, a shaft sunk in our common consciousness, a theme that reached further than the experience it transcribed.” To quote directly from the magazine’s prospectus, “it will have the courage of its modernness.”

As subsequent chapters proceed, we gather a useful sense of the magazine’s specifics: a quarterly bound like a book with usually 20 pieces of text per issue, with typically 20 illustrations, and no advertisements except those for books. Its price was steep at five shillings per copy. We learn about Aubrey Beardsley as art director and how, perhaps surprisingly, he didn’t hire female illustrators for the five issues under his directorship. Scholars who work with the Yellow Book may have long wondered about the magazine’s dearth of female illustrators, given its signature commitment to female authors. Indeed, Mabel Dearmer was the first woman to produce a Yellow Book cover, an opportunity made possible only after Beardsley’s exit from the Yellow Book. Volume X, Adams tell us, had women authors outnumbering men with nine of the 15 pieces. And, in summary, Adams tabulates: “By the end of its run, out of 137 writers who appeared in The Yellow Book, 47 were female, making women a third of the total.” Adams explains why Michael Field may not have admired the Yellow Book, suggesting that the work submitted for publication was not quickly or enthusiastically accepted.

Adams aptly situates the magazine in the context of larger cultural forces and events, including the Suffrage Movement and the trials of Oscar Wilde. Adams cites Linda K. Hughes’s interesting claim that the magazine’s female authors were freer than male authors to express ideas in sympathy with Wilde, even as the Yellow Book publicly distanced itself from Wilde’s travails. Adams’ book takes us through late-century battles over gender and sexuality, the rise of the New Woman, and the regenerative energies of socialism and anarchism, all of which illuminates the mission of the Yellow Book, which closed in the spring of 1897.

The chapters of Decadent Women unfold as a series of biographies that people “the Yellow Book set.” The book’s structure proceeds by way of a sketch of an individual per chapter; each mini-biography tends to deliver on a key theme or claim. The reader encounters not only the magazine’s most celebrated writers such as George Egerton, Ella D’Arcy, Charlotte Mew, and Olive Custance (the magazine’s most featured poet, appearing in eight of 13 volumes) but also less well known names, such as Pearl Craigie, Mabel Dearmer, Gabriela Cunninghame Graham, and Leila Crackanthorpe, the only woman to be published in both the Yellow Book and its successor magazine, the Savoy. Adams’s study covers ground we today know little about, and his explorations certainly widen and diversify the archive. The book also explores the legacy of the magazine following its closure.

One of the great virtues of Adams’s book is its traveling to certain sites and venues in its account of a magazine’s operations. A study of a publishing endeavor sustained by its staff and authors, Decadent Women reveals a recurring interest in the many spaces where women could, and could not, go. For example, it strikes a reader how essential gentlemen’s social clubs were to the conception and running of the magazine. Clubland stands alongside the other male-only zones that appear in this study: public houses, city streets, the Rhymers’ Club, the G1 Albany. Yet of equal interest are the co-ed sites for commingling, including the West End shopping district and salons. Playing a special role in this study is the new venue of the women’s club: The Pioneer (open in 1892), the New Victorian Club on Sackville Street, the Women Writers’ Club, and—the first women’s club to be sited in the traditionally male zone of London’s clubland—the Lyceum. In the book’s second half, especially in its final chapters, theater in the early twentieth century proves an especially welcoming, vibrant venue for women writers. Specifically, I noted the repeated appearance of London’s Royal Court Theatre in the lives of these female authors. Glimpses into this storied venue’s history, and its crucial role for New Woman authors, are a bonus for Adams’s readers.

Another surprise of the book is the Irish presence in Yellow Book circles; I wish Adams had had more to say about this affinity. From Yeats attending the launch (where he met one of his “muses,” Olivia Shakespear) and George Moore and Ella D’Arcy—whose income came from a family estate in Ireland—to George Egerton, whose father was of Irish descent and who lived in Dublin for part of her childhood, and Ethel Colburn Mayne, whose parents were members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, this robust Irish involvement in the Yellow Book and its orbit provides a potentially rich through line. Irishness in this book registers the reverberations of the era’s progressive commitments, radical energies inscribed into the lives of the women profiled here—women who strove to write for a living and aimed to imagine freedom, autonomy, options, different futures. As a group biography, Decadent Women reads as a kind of metanarrative of aspiration within everyday lives of, at times, considerable ordinariness. This book is commendable in its efforts at scholarly recovery work.

But I will admit to a concern I had as I read Decadent Women, a persistent sense of the book’s over-reaching. Indeed, the study’s foundational assertion seems over-stated. Adams claims that scholarship on Decadence has been male-dominated; however, there are many important women scholars who have explored gender, gender politics, and Decadence: Margaret Stetz, Linda K. Hughes, Elaine Showalter, Linda Dowling, Ann Ardis, and Kathy Psomiades are a few names that quickly come to mind. Several of these scholars’ works are sources for Adams’s research—primary among them is Stetz, who provides the book with one of its cover blurbs. Yet another, perhaps subtler way that the book over-extends is through its reliance on gossip and speculation when it comes to telling the stories of individuals’ lives. Chapters too often rely on such phrasing as “is said to have spoken…” or “this may well have been the cause…” In fact, the book as a whole contains too much surmise. A turn to biography may be especially fraught when fiction becomes a source over-relied upon for assembling the facts and conditions of a life. Such an approach seems even more vexed for a group of authors, much like Carrie Horsfall, drawn to what we today might call “avatars” or “handles,” or what they might have understood as “personae” or Wildean “masks.” Given the authorial desire or need for the performativity of identity, treating literary work as a source for culling the facts of existence is a risky move—especially when the objective is, as Adams states it in his appendix, “to allow their authentic voices to be heard.”

Biographies promise us intimacy, yet I felt too often pulled out of and away from the work of Adams’s study. I place Decadent Women within the recent “biographical turn” in humanities scholarship or what has been called the “new biography studies.” Decadent Women enjoys fine company with such works as Daisy Hay’s Young Romantics and Lyndall Gordon’s Outsiders. Alison Booth’s influential theorizing work on biography, especially female biography and, even more pertinently, collective biography, is salient here. Collective biography, or “prosopography,” Booth argues, has ancient roots in the genres of saints’ lives or “parallel lives”—work that can effectively recapture what’s missing or lost.**

** I think here of Richard Evans’ Hitler’s People, a group biography that shows us the faces of The Third Reich, travels inside to get at the interior lives that made the rise of Hitler possible.

   Yet Decadent Women does, at times, make me skeptical of a too easy turn to biography, as when Adams describes how author Leila Crackanthorpe suffered a miscarriage and then such an event appears in a verse play of hers. In fact, the book focuses quite a lot of energy on women’s looks: publisher Grant Richards calls Sissie Welch “an almost beautiful woman ”; Adams writes, at another point, about Charlotte Mew, that “she may not have been lesbian enough.” Often there seems to me something of a confusion between scholarship and gossip.

   Of course there are perils and pleasures in the current vogue of the lyrical-scholarly voice. In Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, we find a blend of invention and research, though Hartman provides ample reflection on her method. Adams does acknowledge the risks entailed in her own approach, as when she writes, “It is unwise to attempt to distil biographical fact from creative work.” But further reflection, of the sort Hartman provides, would have been welcome.