Women poets and contested spaces in The Yellow Book

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 44, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 849-872

  Hughes, Linda K ^a  

^a TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62349130280     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2004.0038     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. Margaret Diane Stetz, "Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties," VS35, 1 (Autumn 1991): 71-86
2. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (Washington DC: Georgetown Univ. Press, 1990)
3. and Laurel Brake, "Endgames: The Politics of The Yellow Book or, Decadence, Gender, and the New Journalism," in Essays and Studies 1995: The Endings of Epochs, ed. Brake (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 38-64
4. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art. and Literature, ed. RandalJohnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), p. 51
5. See Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 3, 10-1
6. According to Simon Eliot, the market share of poetry and drama in the 1890s increased, but only very slightly {Some Patterns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800-1919, Occasional Papers of the Bibliographical Society 8 [London: Bibliographical Society, 1994], p. 50)
7. and Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 11. Both remark on the continuing cultural prestige of poetry despite its restricted market share of sales
8. A. Brisau, for example, identifies William Butler Yeats as the only major poet to appear in The Yellow Book and, while noting recurrent themes of eroticism, disillusionment, and weariness among poems by other contributors, finds little originality in their work-and too much "grandiloquent bombast" ("The Yellow Book and Its Place in the Eighteen-Nineties, " SGG 8 [ 1966]: 135-72, 157-68)
9. James G, Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 150-1
10. Stetz, "Debating Aestheticism from a Feminist Perspective," in Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 25-43, 29-30
11. and Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 2-7
12. See, e.g., Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, "New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siécle," Women: A Cultural Review 10, 1 (1999): 22-34
13. and the anthology edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain, Poetry of the 1890s (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1997)
14. Stetz, "Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth," pp. 72-4
15. Ian Fletcher, "Decadence and the Little Magazines," in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Fletcher, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 17, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 173-202, 174
16. Katharine Tynan, herself a contributor to both the "Wares of Autolycus" and poetry columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, asserts that Henry Cust's poetry column published the "best to be had of the young literature"; "How we looked for the poem-'Occ Verse' as it was irreverently called in the composing room" (The Middle Years [London: Constable, 1916], pp. 112, 117)
17. Sally Mitchell, "New Women, Old andNew," VLC 27, 2 (1999): 579-88, 580-4
18. Anya Clayworth, "The Woman's World: Oscar Wilde as Editor," VPR 30, 2 (Summer 1997): 84-101, 89, 95-6
19. Barbara Kanner, Women in English Social History 1800-1914: A Guide to Research, 3 vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1990), 1:48
20. Wilde, "English Poetesses," Queen 74, 8 December 1888
21. (rprt. in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann [New York: Random House, 1968], pp. 101-8, 105)
22. For a sampling of the substantial body of New Woman poems authored in the 1890s, see New Woman Poets: An Anthology, ed. Linda K. Hughes (London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 2001)
23. There are complex reasons for the relative invisibility of such poems in scholarship on New Woman writers, ranging from the importance of narrative analysis in feminist studies to the obfusca-tion of New Woman poems that resulted when they were widely scattered amidst more traditional lyrics within individual volumes. For further analysis of New Woman poetry, see the introduction to New Woman Poets (pp. 1-11)
24. and Vadillo, "Women Poets and the Aesthetics of Space and Transport at the Fin de Siècle" (Ph.D. diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2000)
25. Arthur Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November 1893
26. (rprt. in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, ed. Karl Beckson, rev. edn. [Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1993], pp. 134-51, 135)
27. Linda Dowling, "The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890's," JVCF 33, 4 (March 1979): 434-53, 437-41
28. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 170
29. Richard Le Gallienne, "Woman-Poets of the Day," English Illustrated Magazine (April 1894): 648-57, 650
30. Charles Newton-Robinson's "Hor. Car. I. 5" (volume 4)
31. W. A. Mackenzie's "'Here Lies Oliver Goldsmith'" (listed as "Oliver Goldsmith's Grave" in the table of contents for volume 5)
32. Richard Garnett's "Two Sonnets from Petrarch" (volume 9)
33. Garnett's "An Emblem of Translation" (volume 10)
34. Arthur Christopher Benson, "Daimonizsmenod," Yellow Book 1 (April 1894): 83
35. Gosse, "Alere Flammam," Yellow Book 1 (April 1894): 153-4
36. Dollie Radford, "Song," Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 116
37. De Mattos, "In a Gallery: Portrait of a Lady (Unknown)," Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 177-8
38. See, e.g., Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 158-66, 162-3
39. Teresa de Lauren's, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 108, 113-5, 135
40. and Lynne Pearce, Woman/ Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 1-3
41. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), pp. 118-9
42. Stetz, "Debating Aestheticism," pp. 29-30
43. Charles Sydney, "Two Songs," Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 189-90, 189
44. Newton-Robinson, "Hor. Car. I. 5," Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 202
45. John Davidson, "Proem to 'The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender,'" Yellow Book A (January 1895): 284-5, 284
46. Katherlne Mix identifies Dolf Wyllarde as a woman writer based on the archives of A. P. Watt, As Mix notes, Wyllarde went on to author some forty novels in her career [A Study in Yellow: The "Yellow Book" and Its Contributors [Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1960], p. 128). Wyllarde also published later volumes of verse with Lane
47. Hughes, "Feminizing Decadence: Poems by Graham R. Tomson," in Women and British Aestheticism, pp. 119-38
48. Nesbit, "Day and Night," Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 234
49. Stanley Weintraub, "The Yellow Book: A Reappraisal," JGE 16, 2 (July 1964): 136-52, 146
50. William Watson, "Hymn to the Sea," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 11-8, 12, 18. There is more than a little reflexive irony in Watson's penultimate line, given the editorial detection of "error" and ensuing "cancellation" in the original artwork of volume 5 after peremptory threats by Watson and Meynell to leave the Bodley Head press if Beardsley was not dismissed. Intriguingly, the beginning of stanza 4 strikes another reflexive note relative to the publication history of volume 5, given Watson's odd word choice to describe human instability in contrast to nature's unwavering law: "Yea, it is we, light perverts, that waver, and shift our allegiance" (p. 17)
51. See Hughes, "Rosamund Marriott Watson," in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing, Dictionary of Literary Biography 240 (Detroit: Gale, 2001), pp. 308-20, for a full account
52. Nora Hopper, "Shepherds' Song," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 189-90
53. Macdonald, "Refrains," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 130-1, 130. Ellipses as found in the original document
54. Macdonald, "Refrains," 131. Stetz reports parallel instances of Bodley Head authors who responded obliquely but sympathetically to Wilde after his trials and imprisonment
55. see "'Mrs. John Lane' of the Bodley Head: The Business of Domesticity in a New Century," JENS 28 (2001): 19-28, 21
56. Davidson, "Fleet Street Eclogue," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 299-317, 301, 303, 305, 316
57. Stetz, "Oscar Wilde and 'Modern' Women" (paper presented at the Oscar Wilde Symposium, Magdalen College, Oxford, 15-7 September 2000)
58. Sally Ledger notes that while New Woman writers were often linked along with Wilde to decadent sexuality, many (by no means all) of these women took care to distance themselves from any hint of sexual impropriety ("The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism," in Cultural Politics at the "Fin de Siècle", ed. Ledger and Scott McCracken [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995], pp. 22-44, 30)
59. Rosamund Marriott Watson, "The Golden Touch," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 77
60. Radford, "A Song," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 121-2
61. Custance, "A Madrigal," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 215-6. Both Virginia Blaln and Brocard Sewell remark on Custance's affair with Natalie Clifford Barney prior to wedding Lord Alfred Douglas
62. See Blaln, "Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet; or, No Sex Please-We're Poets," in Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Blain (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 135-63, 139
63. Sewell, Olive Custance: Her Life and Work (London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 1975), pp. 12-3. Those readers acquainted with Custance and her romantic relationship with Barney would likely have brought a lesbian framework to this poem in The Yellow Book; even readers unacquainted with Custance might have recognized a resemblance between the situation of "A Madrigal" and poetic fragments by Sappho as well as poems by Michael Field in Long Ago (1889), a gathering of lyrics inspired by Sapphic fragments
64. Charles G. D. Roberts, "Earth's Complines," Yellow Book 6 [July 1895): 60-1, 61
65. Theodore Watts, "Two Letters to a Friend," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 333-5
66. Macdonald, "To the Bust of the Pompeian Coelia," Yellow Book 7 (October 1895): 117-9
67. Hopper, "Wolf-Edith," Yellow Book 9 (April 1896): 57-9
68. Custance, "The White Statue," Yellow Book 11 (October 1896): 91
69. Ainslie, "The Death ofVerlaine," Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 194-6, 196
70. Mix notes the similarity in theme between "The Question" and the Henrik Ibsen play (p. 246)
71. Stephen Phillips, "The Question," Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 74-5
72. Rosamund Marriott Watson, "Oasis," Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 212
73. The exceptions were volumes with express political intent, such as Liberty Lyrics, a collection of anarchist lyrics by Louisa Bevington (London: James Tochatti, "Liberty" Press, 1895)