The Yellow Book, an Illustrated Quarterly

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. The Yellow Book bursts with the decadent energy of 1890s modernism, gathering poems, stories, essays, and visual art from figures such as Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, Max Beerbohm, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. Its pages move from sharp social satire to lyrical reverie, challenging gender ideals, moral earnestness, and the age's reforming impulses while celebrating wit, beauty, and restless intelligence. Among its most provocative pieces, "Women—Wives or Mothers" mocks the impossible standards men impose on women, arguing that society forces artificial choices between wifehood and motherhood and then judges women by fantasies rather than reality. Elsewhere, the book contrasts the alluring, impractical "wife-woman" with more conventional domestic ideals, then turns to a tender poem urging lovers to speak in the secrecy of night. A central comic tale follows Jeanne, the poised young heir to St. Radegonde's hereditary executioner, who calmly claims her post, demands independence and fair pay, and spars brilliantly with her cousin Enguerrand over love, duty, and respectable femininity. Her triumph is tempered by private doubt, while the surrounding essays and sketches deepen into meditations on twilight, quiet routines, books, tobacco, commerce, sympathy, and the beauty of solitary walks through city streets, cloisters, and cathedral shadows.