• '

  In Decadent Women, Jad 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

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  Jad Adams’ Decadent Women is a . . . compendium of the female writers associated with the Yellow Book, alternating the stories of their lives with a more or less chronological account of the journal in which they appeared.

  '

  London Review of Books

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  On 16 April 1894, in the dining room of a club in Soho, the Yellow Book was launched. It soon became the leading literary and art magazine of the 1890s . . . What is less well known, perhaps, is that a third of the contributors were women. In his new book, London-based researcher Jad Adams tells the forgotten history of the women who wrote for this innovative journal.

  '

  The Idler

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  Adams, a research fellow at the University of London’s Institute of English, presents a valuable . . . study of women writers who published in The Yellow Book, an avant-garde British literary journal . . . Adams does a fine job of portraying how these authors pushed back against constrictive norms.

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  Publisher’s Weekly

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  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 Jad Adams’ 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’ book liberates the women writers and artists of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ from academic obscurity, and makes the reader want to know them better.

  '

  The Tablet

• '

  Decadent Women is an account of some of [the] women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, based 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 favoured 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.

  '

  Intentions, the magazine of the Oscar Wilde Society

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  Founded by Henry Harland and John Lane, it was a hardcover quarterly ranging from 267 to 414 pages, with numerous wood block illustrations adorning both the covers and the interior pages. It arrived on the literary scene in 1894 and lasted through 1897. But however short-lived, its thirteen issues had an influence of almost mythic proportions on both sides of the Atlantic. A new book by Adams titled Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives tells the story of this extraordinary burst of literary light, along with that of founders Harland and Lane . . . Decadent Women is a surprisingly readable, even page-turning, book. Adams has researched deeply into an under-studied pocket of literary women and queer literary life in Britain. He presents their portraits with the narrative sweep of a fine novel, or perhaps a novel of linked stories. The book is profusely illustrated with useful and clever graphics and photographs of these remarkable women and their creations.

  '

  Gay and Lesbian Review

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  Jad Adam’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.

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  London Grip

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  Focused on critically-neglected women writers’ contributions to the iconic decadent periodical the Yellow Book, Adams’s book is the first to bring so many of them together in one volume and to present them not at the periphery but at the centre of Yellow Book culture . . . Remarkable in both its depth and breadth, the book dedicates chapters to an impressive plethora of fearless, free-spirited, resourceful women writers . . . It is a page-turner that appeals to scholars in English Literature, Art History, History, Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies as well as the wider public with interests in aesthetic, decadent, feminist, and modernist movements.

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  English Studies Journal

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  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.

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  Washington Independent Review of Books

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  Decadent Women – a title hard to resist – is full of extraordinary women . . . all their names can be found in The Yellow Book, a famous if relatively short-lived art and literature quarterly published between 1895 and 1897.

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  The Journal, Newcastle

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  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.

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  David Weir, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, The Cooper Union, New York

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  An elegant and compelling study that will be essential reading for all those interested in The Yellow Book and the New Woman.

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  Kate Hext, Associate Professor of Decadent Literature and the Arts, University of Exeter

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  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

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  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

Part One: Fin de Siècle

1 The Launch
2 Gabriela’s Deceptions
3 The Forerunner
4 Yellow Book Types
5 ‘Hast thou slain the Yallerbock?’
6 Office Wars
7 A Paris Mystery
8 Mabel’s Urge for Fame
9 Netta Syrett and the Flat of Girls
10 Ménie Muriel Dowie’s Celebrity
11 Evelyn Sharp and the Last Volume

Part Two: Commence de Siècle

12 Family Battles
13 Charlotte Mew: Love Rebuffed
14 Ella D’Arcy: ‘Not dead yet’
15 Netta Syrett’s Drama Curtailed
16 Mabel’s War
17 Unresting Dragonfly
18 George Egerton: ‘This life is dry rot’
19 Suffragette Warrior
20 The Ship with Black Sails

Appendix: List of All Women Writers for the Yellow Book

References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Jad Adams is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His many books include Women and the Vote: A World History (2014).