Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives
Description
The never-before-told story of the extraordinary women behind a trailblazing British magazine.
During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, and drawing on original research, Jad Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favored men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease, and unwanted pregnancy.
Praise for Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives
"The Yellow Book’s authors—male and female—tackled themes that even today are taboo in some circles: same-sex relationships, extramarital affairs, domestic violence, abortion. Some cribbed from their own lives and were labeled 'decadent.' . . . Adams focuses on eleven of the magazine’s most prolific women writers and makes mention of some three-dozen others. Their struggles for professional recognition are as infuriating as they are fascinating. . . . When he gets down to the nitty-gritty, the book gets juicy."
— Washington Independent Review of Books
"Examining the lives of such authors as short story writer Ella D’Arcy, novelist Ménie Muriel Dowie, and biographer Ethel Colburn Mayne, Adams contends that though these women came from different social classes and countries, they shared a 'decadent' mindset (a 'catch-all term for challenges to the establishment consensus' in the 1890s) that manifested in their questioning of gender roles and writing frankly about sexuality and women’s struggles and desires. . . . Adams does a fine job of portraying how these authors pushed back against constrictive norms. . . . This is worth a look."
— Publishers Weekly
“In Decadent Women, Adams . . . traces the intersecting paths of the female writers, artists and sub-editors who contributed to the notorious Yellow Book, the most beautiful magazine of the 1890s. . . . He has been painstaking in his research, making use of diaries, letters and contemporary reminiscences. He is a good storyteller and there are many vivid anecdotes here, which will interest the general reader as well as devotees of the period.”
— Literary Review
"[Decadent Women] charts a period in which ‘educated girls of any character’, in the words of Netta Syrett, who was one of them, ‘were asserting their right to independence if they could prove themselves capable of earning their own living. Or for that matter, even if they couldn’t or didn’t.’ The result of such assertions often proved, as Ménie Muriel Dowie, another Yellow Book contributor, put it, ‘rather a grotesque little mess of trying to rearrange life.'"
— London Review of Books
“The Yellow Book established the careers of many women writers and artists who ultimately made up a third of its contributors. Their stories are told in Adams’s refreshing, new, female-centred account of an important epoch in fin-de-siècle literary history. . . . More than just a group biography, Decadent Women is an engaging cultural history of the 1890s literary and artistic avant-garde and its fragmented afterlife in the post-Victorian era of imperial decline and war. Adams guides the reader expertly through the stages of The Yellow Book’s textual and physical production and vividly reconstructs its fractious, often female-dominated office politics from letters, diaries and company records. While grounded in diligent scholarship, Adams’s book liberates the women writers and artists of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ from academic obscurity, and makes the reader want to know them better.”
— Tablet
"A title hard to resist. . . . [Adams's] book is full of extraordinary women."
— CULTURED. North East
"This delightful and engaging book unfolds a much-needed account of the women connected to the Yellow Book and more widely the English fin de siècle. The author brings vividly to life this radical and experimental world, from which women, as so often, have been effaced, the importance of their contribution at best not recognized. Decadent Women provides a valuable corrective and an important addition to our picture of this ‘decadent’ world."
— Elizabeth Wilson, author of "Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts and "Unfolding the Past"
"An elegant and compelling study that will be essential reading for all those interested in the Yellow Book and the New Woman."
— Kate Hext, associate professor of decadent literature and the arts, University of Exeter
“Through superb storytelling . . . this is a book that reflects impressive scholarship and research, but that wears its scholarship lightly. It draws upon a wide range of biographical materials, both published and unpublished, including archives and letters, while also featuring, along the way, some illuminating close readings of texts by the featured women authors. . . . I couldn’t put it down!”
— Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and professor of humanities, University of Delaware
“Part literary history, part social history, and entirely delightful, Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives is a detailed, diverting, and accessible study of all the women who contributed to the groundbreaking fin-de-siècle magazine, showing how it made their careers even as they made it the bible of British decadence.”
— David Weir, professor emeritus of comparative literature, Cooper Union, New York
"Adams’s book is the first to document the female contribution to a journal that began to be associated with the blanket term decadence. . . . Often in Decadent Women it’s the stress and power struggles between the women v men and other females that prove to be as involving as the poetry or stories. . . . [A] delightful, serious and un-gossipy book.”
— London Grip
