Women of The Yellow Book

Thursday 31 March & Thursday 7 April 2022

In association with the University of Surrey

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives
Jad Adams

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives is the culmination of 20 years of research into the lives and work of a selection of women who wrote for the Yellow Book. The paper covers the methodology of selecting 11 for closer study from the 47 women writers. In the 1890s for the first time a large group of women left family homes to seek out work for themselves, find their own places to live, choose their own names and their own relationships. This paper addresses the challenges which they had in common in a literary market place overwhelmingly weighted towards men. It describes their living conditions in such places as women’s lodging houses and the reasons for success in the literary marketplace supplied by the Yellow Book with the contemporary juxtaposition of the ‘decadent’ and the ‘New Woman.’ They built up networks of supportive friends and accessed women-positive spaces which developed, notably the ‘at homes’ of Aline and Henry Harland and afternoon teas of John Lane.

Jad Adams is a Research Fellow of the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.  His books include Madder Music Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson (2000); Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle (2004) Kipling (2006) and Women and the Vote: A World History (2014). He has written widely on 1890s characters including Ménie Muriel Dowie, Olive Custance, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Hubert Crackanthorpe and Leila Macdonald, Gabriela and Robert Cunninghame Graham, and Ethel Colburn Mayne.  His current project is a book titled Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives.  www.jadadams.co.uk

Yellow Nineties 2.0: Reanimating Yellow Book Lives
Lorraine Janzen Kooistra

Yellow Nineties 2.0 offers open-access digital editions of 8 fin-de-siècle little magazines, including The Yellow Book. Collectively, these titles showcase the exciting new art and experimental literature characteristic of the dissident periodicals that emerged to challenge mainstream culture at the turn of the last century. Digital affordances make the crumbling pages of these ephemeral publications newly accessible to scholars, enabling the study of non-canonical authors and artists—many of them women—in the context of their aesthetic, personal, and political networks. In searchable digital editions of magazines, born-digital scholarship such as the Y90s Biographies, and digital affordances such as the Y90s Personography, one might say that the online Yellow Book Archives have re-animated the study of Yellow Book lives.

A work-in-progress since 2005, Yellow Nineties 2.0 has had two distinct phases of development. In this talk, I reveal the site’s iterative origins and discuss how the digital humanities processes of remediation, collaboration, and “thinking through making” have impacted my understanding of fin-de-siècle little magazines. I’ll conclude by offering a few thoughts about the cultural significance of the Y90s site as both an open-access educational resource and as peer-reviewed public scholarship.

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Emerita Professor of English at Ryerson University, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her specialization in Victorian visual-verbal relations and print culture has resulted in numerous articles and three monographs: The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated Books (1995); Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (2003); and Pictures, Poetry, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855-1875 (2011). Over the last two decades, her Victorian scholarship has increasingly incorporated the theories and practices of the digital humanities. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Lorraine is currently working on the final stages of Yellow Nineties 2.0, an open-access scholarly resource dedicated to the study of eight little magazines produced in Great Britain between 1889 and 1905. Her intersecting scholarly interests are evident in her essay last fall for The Journal of the William Morris Society, commemorating the 130th anniversary of the Kelmscott Press: “Fundamental Sympathy: The Gothic, the Fin-de-Siècle Printing Revival, and the Digital.” Chapters exploring other aspects of fin-de-siècle little magazines are forthcoming in Studies in Scottish Literature (special issue on Scottish Cosmopolitanism); Nineteenth-Century Victorian Women Illustrators (Manchester UP); and Literature in Transition: The 1890s (Cambridge UP).

Kate Krueger is Director of the Honors Program and Professor of Literature at Clarkson University. Her previous positions include Director of the Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Associate Professor of English at Arkansas State University. She is the author of British Women Writers and the Short Story, 1850–1930: Reclaiming Social Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her recent essays have appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Women’s Writing, and English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920.

Heather Marcovitch received her PhD in English in Victorian Literature from the University of Florida. She teaches Victorian literature, children’s literature, literary theory, and essay writing at Red Deer Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada, where her research focuses on the writing and culture of the late Victorian period in England, especially as it pertains to The Yellow Book and the Bodley Head publishing company. She is the author of The Art of the Pose: Oscar Wilde’s Performance Theory, the co-editor of two books on television studies, and of articles on late Victorian and modernist writers, on The Yellow Book and on the afterlives of Oscar Wilde. She is currently under contract with MacFarland Press to write a companion volume to Oscar Wilde’s writings. Her essay on Ella D’Arcy will be published in Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens this spring. Her current research focuses on George Egerton’s relationship to John Lane and she is developing a longer project about secular Judaism, literature, and the Victorian fin de siècle.

Sarah Parker is a Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (Routledge, 2013) and Michael Field: Decadent Moderns (co-edited with Ana Parejo Vadillo, Ohio University Press, 2019). She has published several articles and book chapters on poets including Amy Levy, H.D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Olive Custance.

Michelle Reynolds is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her thesis looks at women illustrators in Britain active between the years 1880 and 1920 and their relationship to the New Woman feminist ideal and cultural icon. More broadly, her research interests include art and literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a focus on women artists and writers, gender and sexuality, print and exhibition culture, photography, and fashion. She is currently a PGR Representative for the University of Exeter’s Centre for Victorian Studies and an editor for Romance, Revolution and Reform based at the University of Southampton.

Cátia Rodrigues is a PhD Candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, funded by TECHNE/AHRC. Her research focuses on the diverse artistic networks formed by women who contributed to the initial stage of the Pre-Raphaelite movement not only as artists, but also as writers, patrons, models. She aims to explore the extent to which their participation reveals a collective artistic identity, and how their gendered contributions affected the aesthetic direction of Pre-Raphaelitism in its first decades. Cátia is currently Legacy Officer and Dissertation Prize Coordinator at the Association for Art History’s Doctoral and Early Career Research Network (DECR) Committee, and is also the Newsletter Editor for the Women’s History Network (WHN).