Abstract
Whilst decadence implies decline, “endings are often new beginnings” (p. 107), says Adams, whose book documents how the fin de siècle brought women writers greater personal, professional, and political freedoms. 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. Although no woman actively identified as decadent in the 1890s, which was more typically associated with men like Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Adams’s book places women “at the centre of the most exciting developments in art and literature” (p. 196). The morally-dubious Decadent and the independent New Woman – viewed by Victorians as “twin monsters of a degenerate age” (quoting Elaine Showalter’s 1993 book Daughters of Decadence) – both had “revolutionary potential”, and the Yellow Book evidences their “joint artistic enterprise” (pp. 105-6).