‘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 ground-breaking fin-de-siècle magazine, showing how it made their careers even as they made it the bible of British decadence.’ David Weir, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, The Cooper Union, New York
In the 1890s, British women began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Jad Adams describes in Decadent Women the lives and work of the passionate women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book, and the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace and a society that overwhelmingly favoured men. Jad Adams documents the challenges they faced in their industry, 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.