GLR July-August 2024

A Quarterly of One’s Own

S ET IN THE OFFICES of a Victo rian magazine that he edited, many of Anthony Trollope’s later short stories fictionalize his encounters with aspiring authors, whether talented or not, ambitious or retiring, male or female, but overwhelmingly the latter. Given the success of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Gaskell, and George Eliot, not to mention enormous women. Founded by Henry Harland and John Lane, it was a hardcover quarterly ranging from 267 to 414 pages, with nu merous wood block illustrations adorn ing both the covers and the interior pages. It arrived on the literary scene in 1894 and lasted through 1897. But how ever short-lived, its thirteen issues had an influence of almost mythic propor tions on both sides of the Atlantic. A new book by Jad Adams titled Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives tells the story of this extraordinary burst of liter ary light, along with that of founders Harland and Lane. John Lane was the publisher of the Bodley Head, the Grove Press of its day for its edginess and trendiness. Comments Jad Adams: “Lane was fond of beautifully crafted books and women, which gave him the sobriquet ‘Petticoat Lane.’” Henry Harland was n’t shy either, taking a bit of credit when referring to Evelyn Sharp’s best story as his “darling of my heart, child of my editing.” The Yellow Book ’s greatest achieve ment was undoubtedly the representa tion of women writers in its pages. The so-called “New Woman” of 1890s jour nalism was well represented. (There was a great deal of “borrowing of authors” from the book catalogue to the maga zine, and vice versa.) Some of these women, such as Ella D’Arcy, had enor mous sway as co-editors and, in effect, office managers. By year two, as much as 47 percent of the featured talent was women, such as au courant poster artist Mabel Dearmer, whose work was fre

quently showcased. But it was always the two men who did the selecting. They im mediately sought fiction from “George Egerton” and Gabriela Cunninghame Gra ham, who fabricated her name, her ances try, and really her entire life. Other women were quite successful even after the maga zine folded, especially Netta Syrett and Olive Custance, whom Lane called “My lit

F ELICE P ICANO

DECADENT WOMEN Yellow Book Lives by Jad Adams Reak ti on Books. 388 ages, $30.

best sellers like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Se cret, women flocked to London dead set upon becoming wealthy, celebrated authors. They continued to do so two decades later, especially when a new magazine called The Yellow Book opened its doors to

tle Sappho.” A commercially successful author, Custance had affairs with millionaire writer Natalie Barney, among others, and married Lord Douglas—“Bosie”—clearly a marriage of convenience for both of them. A crisis that erupted during the course of The Yellow Book ’s

run was the arrest of Oscar Wilde, which had immediate repercussions for the magazine. It’s not that Wilde ever contributed, but when Lane landed in New York and saw headlines and photos of Wilde being hauled off to jail with a copyof The Yellow Book under his arm, he saw to it that Beardsley and his openly effeminate gay set got the axe. Lesbian writers like Charlotte Mew went even deeper into the closet. Note that the term “decadent,” so closely as sociated with Wilde, appears in Adams’ title. Contemporary definitions of “decadence” were rather vague. Adams settles on Jerusha McCormack’s later definition of decadence as “a kind of counter-culture, generally employed as anything that appeared to threaten the conventions, moral and social, of the Victorian middle classes.” Several bisexual women whom Adams highlights didn’t bother to hide. Ménie Muriel Dowie had traveled alone dressed “in a shirt and knicker bockers (with detachable skirt) and boots during her early twenties— through the British Isles, Europe, and even the Carpathian Mountains while barely of age, and wrote travel books with ill-disguised female love inter ests.” During this time, “[s]he washed in streams; she lost her watch; she bandaged a servant’s finger with bread and cobwebs; she practiced shooting, prepared to encounter a bear.” In her first novel, she even advocated for ob stetric surrogacy. But once she had achieved literary fame, she married and became one side of a scandalous trian

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