Episode 70. The Yellow Book and Decadent Women

SYNOPSIS

The literary and artistic quarterly, The Yellow Book (1894-97) is often now considered as the standard-bearer of the fin de siècle aesthetic movement that prioritized art for art’s sake beyond the constraints of any unifying moral framework. It was influenced by the daring careers of the writer Oscar Wilde and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley who had collaborated on the 1893 publication of Wilde’s notorious play, Salome in English by John Lane’s Bodley Head.

With the calculated exclusion of the overbearing Wilde, Lane capitalized on the opportunity to bring some of his authors from the Bodley Head list into a new quarterly publication whilst wooing others from rival publishing houses: The Yellow Book’s Prospectus purposed 'to provide an Illustrated Magazine which shall be beautiful as a piece of bookmaking, modern and distinguished in its letter-press and its pictures, and withal popular in the better sense of the word'. Its yellow cover evoked the grim naturalism and decadence of the contemporary French novel, although Lane was careful to include staid and respectable contributors such as Henry James.

Lane also brought across from his Keywords series of new novels and books of stories, those “New Women” who were searching for greater social freedoms as symbolized by the right to a latchkey. Any suspicion that Beardsley was suppressing the contributions of women illustrators ended when he was fired in response to the backlash which accompanied the arrest and prosecution of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Mabel Dearmer became the first woman to design a Yellow Book cover. The episode examines the milieu in which she, the writer Netta Syrett and later suffragette Evelyn Sharp mixed as indicative of the challenges and triumphs faced by the pioneering cohort of female contributors to the Yellow Book.

GUESTS

The TV producer and author Jad Adams has produced biographies of figures as disparate as Ernest Dowson, Tony Benn, Emmeline Pankhurst, Rudyard Kipling and Gandhi. Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives was published in 2023 and is the fruit of a lifelong interest in 1890s decadence. Jad Adams is Research Fellow at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Simon’s interview with Jad Adams was recorded at his home on 19 May 2025.