Volupté is an MLA-indexed online journal of Decadence from antiquity to the present. It appears each year in Spring and Autumn, and brings together in themed issues creative and critical approaches to the fast-growing field of Decadence studies. The aim of Volupté is to enhance and broaden the scope of Decadence studies and stimulate discussion in relation to literary Decadence and other forms of discourse, including Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Science. Peer-reviewed essays and book reviews will be published alongside new translations, poetry, short fiction, and visual art. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London,Volupté is dedicated to promoting cutting-edge work by creative writers and artists and publishing the best research on Decadence by early career and established scholars.
Full Issue Volupté 8.1: Lafcadio Hearn
Notes on Contributors to Volupté 8.1, Lafcadio Hearn (Autumn 2025)
Review: ‘Kwaidan: Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)’, Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin, 7 March-24 August 2025
The Kwaidan Exhibition project emerged from an invitation from Irish artist Stephen Lawlor to forty artists, twenty Japan-based and twenty Ireland-based, to create prints inspired by their choice of text from one of Lafcadio Hearn’s best-known works, completed in the year of his death in Tokyo in 1904. No stranger to curating collective creative crossovers between literature and the visual arts, Lawlor had previously organized an exhibition of the work of Irish writers and artists inspired by Hearn’s contemporary, the Irish ‘Celtic Twilight’ poet and Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats. Indeed, it was while presenting this latter exhibition in Japan in 2017 that he first encountered Hearn’s potent aura.
Review: Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature (Routledge, 2025)
Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature draws on diverse literary genres – ‘the French novel, the modernist novella in proximity to the German Bildungsroman or the Anglo-Saxon short or ghost story’[i] – to explore how the ‘poetic aestheticization’ of Japan played a crucial role within ‘an “eclectic” adoption of modernity’ in fin-de-siècle literature both from Japan and the West (p. 1, p. 6). Following in the footsteps of Japanese studies scholars such as Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams (Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature, 2006), Fukuzawa argues that a ‘mutual process of exoticism and autoexoticism’ shaped ‘the transnational modernization process in Meiji Japan (1868-1912)’ (p. 2). This work is therefore a valuable addition to the trend, carried by scholars such as Stefano Evangelista and Jennifer Yee, approaching Japonisme and exoticism as multipolar phenomena at the intersection of discourses on colonialism, modernity, and self-identity. [i] Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature (Routledge, 2025), p. 212. All subsequent references are provided inline.
Lafcadio Hearn and His American Biographers
American biographies bookend – and dominate – the voluminous range of writings about Lafcadio Hearn published since his death in 1904, extending from Elizabeth Bisland’s important foundational study, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906) to more recent treatments such as Steve Kemme’s The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn (2023). Examining this long tradition now allows us to bring into sharper focus the significance of two major preoccupations in Hearn’s reception – national identity and race – and to critically evaluate the ways in which American biographers have framed the distinctiveness of Hearn’s life and achievement in their work.[i] [i] For a brief treatment of this topic see Paul Murray, ‘Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904)’, The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature 16 (Samhain 2020), pp. 70–71.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Lafcadio Hearn’: A New Translation
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s short essay ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ (1904) provides a brief but powerful insight into the resonance of Hearn’s Japanese writing for European decadent and modernist writing in the early twentieth century. Writers and artists turning to Japan since the mid nineteenth century were building on a history of transnational engagements between East Asia and Central Europe, as well as long-established artistic and intellectual practices of European Orientalism.[i] Studies of japonisme have demonstrated the specific place that Japan held in German and Austrian imaginations by 1900, especially in Hofmannsthal’s Vienna.[ii] As European knowledge of Japanese art and culture developed over the nineteenth century, Hearn’s work fuelled fascination with both the ‘old Japan’ and contemporary Japanese life.[iii] Hofmannsthal’s essay shows this tension in his response to Hearn’s work: his elegiac tone in describing ancient Japanese spiritual practices is combined with stark images of the ongoing Russo-Japanese War, his condescending praise of Japanese intellectuals placed alongside weary dissatisfaction with the ‘burden’ of Western culture. [i] See especially Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang, eds, Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). On German and Austrian orientalism in this period more broadly, see Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (University of Michigan Press, 2004); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Katharina Herold-Zanker, Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880–1920: ‘The Indispensable East’ (Oxford University Press, 2024). [ii] Mirjam Dénes, Györgyi Fajcsák, Piotr Spławski, and Toshio Watanabe, eds, Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts, 2020), and Aglaja Kempf, ‘Oskar Kokoschka und der Japonismus: Wien um 1900 und die japanische Ästhetik’, in Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven, ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold (de Gruyter, 2021), pp. 402–20. [iii] See Kathleen M. Webb, Lafcadio Hearn and his German Critics: An Examination of His Appeal (Lang, 1984), and Gerhard Schepers, ‘Exoticism in Early Twentieth-Century German Literature on Japan’, in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945, ed. by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (Routledge, 2006), pp. 98–116.
The Anatomy of Curiosity and Cosmopolitanism: Lafcadio Hearn’s Medical Imagination
A decade before he made a one-way journey to Japan in 1890, in an article entitled ‘Travel An Educating Influence’ (1880), Lafcadio Hearn, the inquisitive young journalist then working for the New Orleans Item, declared his departure from conventional ideas of nationalism, and instead determined to make ‘one step toward a new and vast movement’ of cosmopolitanism.[i] Rather than abolishing local and historical peculiarities or going back to old nationalistic provincialism, Hearn pleaded for cosmopolitanism by way of curiosity – the insatiable ‘desire or inclination to know or learn about anything’, especially what is novel or strange.[ii] Recent work on Hearn’s cosmopolitanism, by Stefano Evagelista and others, has brought to light the manner in which this characteristic curiosity attached itself to the art, literature, and religious practices of the cultures he encountered.[iii] However, it has tended to overlook the central place of the medical and the scientific in Hearn’s transnational imagination. [i] Hearn, ‘Travel An Educating Influence’, Item (6 February 1880), in Buying Christmas Toys and Other Essays, ed. by Ichiro Nishizaki (Hokuseido, 1939), pp. 31–34 (p. 32). [ii] See the entry ‘curiosity’ (I.5.b) in the Oxford English Dictionary <https://www.oed.com> [accessed 10 July 2025]. [iii] Stefano Evangelista, ‘Lafcadio Hearn and Global Aestheticism’, in Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 72–116.
‘Peculiar, Exotic, Irresistible’: Exotic Decay and the Fantasy of Enslaved Beauty in Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890)
What role do racialized women play in the articulation of decadent aesthetics in the colonial Caribbean? This article takes up that question by turning to Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), a text that registers both fascination and ambivalence toward Creole culture in the wake of emancipation. Hearn is best known as a cosmopolitan figure whose work traverses the US South, the Caribbean, and Japan. Yet while much of the critical attention on Hearn has focused on his global mobility, folkloric ethnography, and Japonisme, his writing in and about the French West Indies has received less sustained analysis. In particular, scholars have yet to fully reckon with the aesthetic and ideological weight he places on the figure of the femme de couleur – a mixed-race woman whose beauty, agency, and racial proximity to whiteness make her a potent figure of both desire and decline.
‘Hand and Soul’: Japanese Craft and Embodied Spirituality in Lafcadio Hearn’s Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897)
Reporting on the Jidai Matsuri festival to celebrate the eleven hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Kyōto in October 1895, Lafcadio Hearn describes finding himself confronted by a dizzying array of crafts. ‘I saw a young man writing Buddhist texts and drawing horses with his feet’, Hearn recalled, noting his admiration also for ‘Butterflies of paper’, ‘maidens “made by glamour out of flowers”’ and an ‘artificial cuttlefish’ which could ‘move all its tentacles’ when air was blown into ‘a little rush tube fixed under its head’.[i] Sent to the festival by the Japan Chronicle, Hearn documented the city’s ‘festive appearance’: ‘A committee has been appointed which has decorated almost every street in the city with lanterns and flags, and […] the town wears a most holiday-like appearance’.[ii] When he expanded his taut reportage into a later article for the Atlantic, republished in his essay collection Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897), Hearn focused especially on the handicrafts he had encountered. [i] Lafcadio Hearn, ‘A Trip to Kyōto’, Atlantic, 77 (May 1896), pp. 613–24 (p. 617). Hearn quotes Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Edward Moxon, 1895), p. 40. [ii] Hearn, ‘The Kyoto Memorial Festival’, Japan Chronicle, 26 October 1895; typescript by P. D. Perkins held in Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (UVA), MS 6101.
Lafcadio Hearn’s Proto-Buddhist, ‘Oceanic’ Caribbean Vision
Lafcadio Hearn’s early writings relating to the sea and evolution are precursors to what I call the cosmic or oceanic meditations of the later work, where the (Buddhist) oceanic quality of time and space takes a central place in his thinking about the universe. As has been shown, Hearn was one of the first European Victorians to imaginatively engage with Buddhism, fitting his own lived experience to ancient ideas newly (re)discovered and conveyed to the West from Indian, Ceylonese, Chinese, and Japanese texts, made available by the work of academic Buddhologists like Eugène Burnouf and Max Müller.[i] Such works introduced a whole new paradigm of thinking, enabling new ways of conceiving reality, which has continued for nearly two centuries with the gradual transmission and transculturation of Buddhist concepts out of its heartlands and into other fields and cultures the world over. In this article I address some of Hearn’s earliest Buddhist tendencies in his Caribbean writings, his painterly descriptions of land- and sea-scapes, and how these meld into vast synaesthetic mindscapes, intimations of deeper and timeless truths – of borderless infinity and incessant change, and the transitoriness of experience. Once these writings begin to be seen within the framework of the developing Buddhist ontology in Hearn’s œuvre, as outlined in The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Hearn’s early tropical writing takes on a deeper significance and dimension – as a precursor and preparation for that greater framework, that deeper ontology that flowers in Japan. [i] John Antony Goedhals, The Neo-Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn: Light from the East (Brill, 2020), p. 141.
The Play of Authorial Voice in Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories
The nineteenth century was critical for the development of the ghost story form as we recognize it today. As Nick Freeman has observed, it was during this century that the ghost story emerged as a ‘distinct genre of short fiction’, instead of its prior existence as interspersed episodes within longer works, and developed its own conventions, formulae, and investments.[i] Near the end of the nineteenth century, despite the proliferation of periodicals and publications publishing short-form supernatural fiction over the decades, the appetite for the genre was still ‘ravenous’.[ii] Significant innovations in literary forms of the fantastic also occurred at the turn of the century, with the genre of the ghost story providing a significant framework for Lafcadio Hearn’s cross-cultural encounters with strange places, customs, and folk traditions during his travels and then later during his Japanese years. As Nicholas Ruddick writes, ‘one of the greatest literary achievements of the fin de siècle was a successful break with fictional realism’, a development which proved crucial for the rising popularity of fantastic literature, experiments with existing forms such as the Gothic and the ghost story, as well as an interest in ‘the development of an old (oral) story-telling tradition’.[iii] The development of the ghost story as a narrative form at the turn of the century was therefore linked to writers’ interest in revisiting folktales as well as oral narratives to create supernatural tales, leading to innovations in narrative structure that are relevant to Hearn’s own literary experiments. [i] Nick Freeman, ‘The Victorian Ghost Story’, in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. by Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 93–107 (p. 93). [ii] Ibid., p. 101. [iii] Nicholas Ruddick, ‘The Fantastic Fiction of the Fin de Siècle’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Gail Marshall (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 189–206 (p. 189); Michal Peprník, ‘R. L. Stevenson and the Fin de Siècle Pre-Modernist Narrative Mosaic’, in The Fantastic of the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Irena Grubica and Zdeněk Beran (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), pp. 73–90 (p. 74).
Lafcadio Hearn: Guest Editor’s Introduction
In a review of Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan in 1894, an anonymous critic in the New York Daily Tribune praised the collection’s ‘wealth of wondrously artistic prose’, noting that ‘the influence of the French decadents is apparent’ in the ‘vivid word-coloring’ of Gautier and the ‘impressionism of Verlaine’.[i] Hearn’s writing, he suggested, ‘seeks to make words minister to all the senses’, so that the ‘printed page must convey color, sound, odor, and glimpses of more ethereal things’.[ii] When the review reached Hearn – then 7,000 miles away in Kōbe, Japan – he was not impressed. In a letter to his friend Ellwood Hendrick, he complained that he was ‘vexed’ by the ‘curious’ suggestion that his style bore the traces of ‘the decadents’. ‘Never read a line of Verlaine in my life’, he insisted, ‘and only know enough of the decadent school to convince me that the principle is scientifically wrong, and that to study the stuff is mere waste of time’.[iii] [i] ‘A Dreamer in Japan: Mr Hearn’s Arcadia in the Orient’, New York Daily Tribune (28 October 1894), p. 14. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Lafcadio Hearn, Letter to Ellwood Hendrick (December 1894), in The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. by Elizabeth Bisland, 2 vols (Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), II, pp. 187–88.
This Halloween issue of Volupté, devoted to the writings of journalist, translator, and writer Lafcadio Hearn and guest-edited by Fraser Riddell, is a useful reminder of the limitations of labelling, an issue that has dogged decadence scholarship since the mid 1950s, when John Reed’s book Decadent Style (1954) sparked new interest in the field and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism published two articles on the meaning of decadence: Clyde de L. Ryals, ‘Towards a Definition of Decadent as Applied to British Literature in the Nineteenth Century’ (September 1958), pp. 85-92, and Robert L. Peters, ‘Towards a “Un-Definition” of Decadent as Applied to British Literature in the Nineteenth Century’ (December 1959), pp. 258-264. Peters’s response to Ryals’s article set the tone for discussions about defining decadence for the next seventy years or so.
Volupté 7.2 Yellow Book Women: Full Issue
Full issue of Volupté 7.2 Yellow Book Women
Notes on Contributors to Volupté 7.2 Yellow Book Women
Review: Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth, Blood Show, Battersea Arts Centre, 12-23 November 2024: Transition, violence, and the choreographic
Ocean Hester Stefan Chillingworth and Craig Hamblin face one another. Ocean is covered from head to toe in fake blood: an exuberance of concocted liquid pain. Craig is caked in clown white. They stand within an arm’s distance of each other; noiseless, expectant. Craig raises his hand to check the quality of the gap between them, one of the many gestures which comprise the durational score that both dancers will repeat on loop throughout the performance. A breath. Suspension. Until the sickening crack of contact breaks the silence. A slap, which moves them both into the concussive rhythm of a sequence of fight choreography which rotates around the space. Navigating a set of modernist design pieces – a white sofa, a white potted plant, a large white rug, a small white table on which sits a water urn (filled with blood) and plastic cups (to hold this blood) – the performers describe broken noses, teeth clamping down into flesh, knees colliding with ribs. As they move there is a transfer of sweaty materiality, red streaks across Craig’s neck, marks on the back of his white jumpsuit where Ocean held on for balance, painting the objects and one another as, negotiating the planar folds of bodies in motion, or redirecting force to sketch the trajectory of a wound, they leave traces. Simultaneously, they offer to us the tender revelation of flesh and musculature underneath blood red, bone white. Two bodies begin to heave and sweat alabaster, sweat crimson, under the heat and pressure of death.
Review: Siôn Parkinson, Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen (Sternberg Press, 2024)
Fascination with mushrooms has experienced a curious renaissance in the humanities within recent decades, as indicated by the scholarly interventions of Anna Tsing (The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015), John Cage (A Mycological Foray, 2020), and Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life, 2020); to name but a few. To this ever-growing field of research, a new and highly evocative title is added. Siôn Parkinson’s Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen is a volume perfumed with thought-provoking entries on the shared resonances between putrid smells, aural landscapes, and phallic fungi. Beyond the arresting image of a ripe dune stinkhorn proudly adorning the front cover, the reader encounters a heady concoction of etymological musings, philosophical provocations and punny wordplays, all of which waft together with each turn of a page. In stylish Plantin typeface, Parkinson crafts an elegant reflection on what is largely considered to be one of the strangest – if not the smelliest – mushrooms to have protruded from the ground below: Phallus impudicus, also known as the ‘common stinkhorn’. While the book reflects a thorough engagement with natural history and mycology, it is wonderfully generous in how it conveys the story of this shameless, earthy growth, and its power to captivate the minds (or indeed noses) of thinkers such as Pliny the Elder, Hadrianus Junius, and John Gerard.
New Woman Poetics and Revisionist Mythmaking in Fin-de-Siècle Periodicals
This article considers how the female-authored poetry of The Yellow Book participates in a New Woman poetics that expands, reclaims, and celebrates women’s embodied experiences, both sexual and spiritual. Building on previous studies of this periodical’s gendered dynamics and aided by the research tools afforded by Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry <https://dvpp.uvic.ca/>, this study situates poems by Rosamund Marriott Watson, Edith Nesbit, and Nora Hopper in relation to broader patterns of revising classical and biblical myth evident throughout fin-de-siècle poetry. Such an approach illuminates new constellations of meaning across periodical contexts and within The Yellow Book itself, inviting re-readings of lyric poems contributed by Olive Custance, Eva Gore-Booth, and others. As these examples underscore, revisionist mythmaking played a crucial role in the New Woman project of articulating more robust expressions of desire—as operative outside a patriarchal economy and as form of spiritual ecstasy that transgresses established categories of sacred/profane.
‘Golden threads in the sober city woof’: London and the First Women Writers of The Yellow Book
Of the eighteen writers whose work appeared in the inaugural volume of The Yellow Book, only three were women: Ella D’Arcy (1857-1937), ‘George Egerton’ (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859-1945), and ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Pearl Richards Craigie, 1867-1906). This article considers the London publishing context within which D’Arcy, Egerton, and Hobbes wrote their pieces that were included in that first issue of the new magazine in April 1894. The women’s representations of London in each of their works are discussed in relation to their common portrayal of artistic characters who must make and potentially mistake their way in its contemporary metropolis.
Netta Syrett’s Afterlife: From London to Hollywood
Although the words above, spoken by the actor Katharine Hepburn in A Woman Rebels, were the creation of two male screenwriters – Anthony Veiller (1903-1965), an American, and Ernest Vajda (1886-1954), a Hungarian emigré to America – the source text for this 1936 film was a 1929 novel by a British woman writer. That the novel in question, Portrait of a Rebel, proved popular and successful enough on both sides of the Atlantic to be of interest to RKO Radio Pictures, a Hollywood studio, seems astonishing now. Its author, Netta Syrett, was a member neither of the current generation nor even of the Edwardian or Georgian ones immediately preceding it, for she had been born in 1865 – thus, in the middle of the previous century – and was nearing the end of a long career. Her literary fame had been achieved first in The Yellow Book with her short story ‘Thy Heart’s Desire’ for the July 1894 issue (Volume II), followed by further contributions in October 1895 (Volume VII) and January 1897 (Volume XII). She had, nonetheless, remained both relevant and appealing to a wide swathe of the reading public. Just how she accomplished what so many of her contemporaries did not can only be a matter for speculation. One possibility, however, was through her close attention to expressions of taste communicated via the medium of reviews, as these became more readily available to authors at the turn of the twentieth century thanks to the rise of professional press-cutting services, to which she herself was a subscriber, as evidenced by the collection of materials sent to her by Romeike and Curtice.
Ella and Marion Hepworth Dixon: ‘What’s in a Name?’
‘The name, of course, [...] the name counts for something. Your late father’s name carries weight with a certain section of the public’, declares a fictional editor in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s seminal New Woman novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894).[i] One cannot help wondering if the name ‘Hepworth Dixon’ resonated in the same way for Henry Harland and John Lane, the editors of The Yellow Book, which began that same year. The name had definitely acquired a certain notoriety earlier in the century when William Hepworth Dixon (1821-1879) had been editor of The Athenæum from 1853 to 1869, but by 1894 two of his daughters, Marion (1856-1936) and her younger sister, Ella (1857-1932), had begun to make names for themselves in the literary world. [i] Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (Broadview, 2004), p. 108. Italics in original. Initially serialised in twelve weekly instalments in the Lady’s Pictorial between January and March 1894, then published in book form later that year by Heinemann in London and Cassell in New York, the novel has since been republished several times, first in 1990 in the Merlin Radical Fiction series. All subsequent page references will refer to the Broadview edition.
Yellow Book Sisters in The Dream Garden: A New Woman Network
In her autobiography The Sheltering Tree (1939), critically-neglected New Woman writer Netta Syrett (1865-1943) records her pride as editor of children’s annual The Dream Garden (1905): ‘I think I had a right to be proud of my Dream Garden, which by now should be a rarity worth the attention of book collectors, if only for the names of some of the contributors!’[i] In a further comment that is both self-effacing and self-congratulating, she writes, ‘I marvel at my boldness in asking such distinguished people to contribute to a more or less private venture […] only a limited number were published’.[ii] The wealth of notable writers and artists boasted by the contents page offers insight into Netta’s creative network and her esteemed place within it. While this list features well-known male writers including Laurence Housman and Arthur Ransome, the contributors are overwhelmingly female. They include artist, author and playwright Constance Smedley (1876-1941), who founded the International Lyceum Club for Women Artists and Writers in 1904 (of which Netta was chairwoman in 1906); Marion Wallace Dunlop (1864-1942), hailed as the first hunger-striking suffragette (in 1909); Slade-trained artist Alice Woodward (1862-1951), a founding member of the Women’s Guild of Arts (1907); and feminist artist, writer, and editor Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951). The Dream Garden, like Netta’s autobiography, evidences her ‘genius for friendship’: that is, her ability to form mutually-beneficial career-enabling companionships and creative partnerships, where ‘socialising becomes part of [her] artistry’.[iii] [i] Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (Geoffrey Bles, 1939), p. 152; The Dream Garden: A Children’s Annual, ed. by Netta Syrett (John Baillie, 1905). Henceforth Netta Syrett is referred to as ‘Netta’ and her sister Nellie Syrett will be referred to as ‘Nellie’, to avoid confusion due to their shared surname. [ii] Syrett, Sheltering Tree, pp. 149–50. [iii] Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), pp.191–92; Joseph Thorne, ‘Decadent Sociability and Material Culture at the Fin de Siècle’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, PhD thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, 2019) <http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/11254/1/2019thornephd.pdf2019> [accessed 27 September 2023], p. 1.
The End of the ‘Marriage Question’: Bad Romance in the Yellow Book Stories of Ella D’Arcy, Evelyn Sharp, and Ada Leverson
By the end of the nineteenth century, a wave of legal reforms had passed into law in England, illustrating the way in which reality often failed to live up to the ideal of companionate marriage lauded in conduct books. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 permitted a woman to sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery and desertion or brutality (a husband could sue for divorce based solely on adultery); it was amended in 1878 to permit a woman to seek a legal separation if her husband was convicted of assaulting her. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 allowed women to keep their earnings after marriage and inheritances or gifts up to £200, and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 updated this to grant every married woman sole possession of all her earnings and inheritances. In 1886, the Maintenance in Case of Desertion Act expanded causes for separation to include desertion and neglect; in 1895 persistent cruelty was added to the list of causes for formal separation, and the law no longer required prior conviction and jailing of the husband.[i] All of these laws echoed broader cultural debates about the ways in which the realities of marriage often harboured violence, economic inequality, and a lack of mutual love, respect, and understanding, despite the pervasive idea – registered in popular fiction – that marriage was a route to happiness. [i] For an overview of Victorian marriage, property, and child custody laws, see Jennifer Phegley, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England (Praeger, 2012), p. xvii.
Virginia Woolf did not appear a comfortable figure as she addressed the students of Newnham College on a bright but windy October day in 1928. The 200 young women in Clough Hall saw a tall, sad-eyed, long-faced woman.[i] She sat on a stage in a hall at a table illuminated by a reading light, alert and ‘sensitively nervous’, speaking of the loss to literature of female exclusion in history.[ii] She famously called up the image of Shakespeare’s sister who had all the attributes of her brother but was female, and so instead of gaining riches and lasting fame by her pen, came to grief. Woolf formulated the main problem as a power imbalance between femaleness and maleness, of the comparative denial of income and privacy between women and men. She proposed a counter-history of women and the interior life, suggesting it as if it were a recent literary discovery, while praising selected women writers of the past. As Talia Schaffer notes, Woolf’s lecture, later expanded into A Room of One’s Own (1929), ignored the recent generation of women writers altogether; ‘her feminist historiography leaps from Charlotte Brontë straight to her own contemporaries’.[iii] [i] Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 1997), p. 564. [ii] Lee, Woolf, p. 566. [iii] Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Women and British Aestheticism (University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 13.
When John Lane published the first volume of The Yellow Book just over 130 years ago in April 1894, no one could have predicted how groundbreaking the periodical would be, not only as a bridge between traditional and modern notions of visual art and literature and a springboard for the career of Aubrey Beardsley, but particularly as an outlet for women writers and artists. This current issue of Volupté, guest-edited by Lucy Ella Rose and Louise Wenman-James (and coming hot on the heels of our last redundancy-delayed issue on neo-Victorian decadence), turns the spotlight on the contributions made by women, ‘drawing out their networks and communities, and exploring how The Yellow Book represented a cornerstone of their careers’ (p. ii).
Yellow Book Women: Guest Editors’ Introduction
In Spring 2022, the British Association of Decadence Studies together with the University of Surrey hosted a series of Jeudis talks on women whose work intersected with the iconic fin-de-siècle quarterly periodical The Yellow Book (1894-1897). Although many women of The Yellow Book are gradually receiving increasing critical attention, these seminars provided the first opportunity for a multidisciplinary discussion of the lives and works of women who contributed in various ways to the periodical. The Jeudis sessions encouraged a consideration of the connections and dialogues between these women, drawing out their networks and communities, and exploring how The Yellow Book represented a cornerstone of their careers.
Notes on Contributors to Volupté 7.1 Neo-Victorian Decadence
Review: Adam Alston, Staging Decadence: Theatre, Performance, and the Ends of Capitalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
Review: Adam Alston, Staging Decadence: Theatre, Performance, and the Ends of Capitalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).
Review: Sarah Green, Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Review: Sarah Green, Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).