Decadent Women

The never-before-told story of the extraordinary women behind a trailblazing British magazine.

During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these 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.

'In Decadent Women, 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

'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