The Poets of the Nineties

Most of the significant work for this year's roundup focuses on women writers, and when the major subject centers on a male author, women writers who are linked with him are accorded importance. To take the latter type of work first, we turn to Harold Billings' M. P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years (Roger Beacham, 2005). Shiel was a well-known figure during the Nineties, and remained so for a good period into the twentieth century. The present volume (a second is in progress) charts Shiel's life and career through the late 1890s, and in doing so Billings illuminates circumstances concerning not Shiel alone, but writers, publishing, and publishers in the era, notably in matters connected with John Lane and his sponsoring of avant-garde ventures. Thus Ella D'Arcy, George Egerton, Richard LeGallienne, Henry Harland, Aubrey Beardsley figure prominently in Billings' pages. Although Shiel has not been remembered as a poet, it is fitting that this book closes with critiques of his Keynote Series books, Prince Zaleski and Shapes in the Fire, both fine achievements in prose-poetry. Prince Zaleski rises above its detective-fiction qualities in emulating the lyrical prose of Poe and in the characterization of the master sleuth, modeled on Poe's Auguste Dupin, while, with its intricate narrative structure, Shapes recalls similar elements in writings by DeQuincey and in George Meredith's fiction.

Billings has ferreted out much useful information concerning Shiel, whose personal life has not previously been so effectively presented, and his placement of Shiel within Nineties cultural movements is likewise judiciously done. Shiel's colorful life through the late Nineties, as set forth here, makes one eagerly await Billings' volume concerning his subject's later years.

Equally colorful subject matter may be found in Linda Hughes's Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters (Ohio Univ. Press, 2005), Hughes's careful, ample researches are evident throughout, and this book furnishes a model study of a writer long overlooked by those whose idea of the 1890s remains largely confined to the Rhymers' Club, Dowson, or Beardsley, though glancing attention is given to the Rhymers, the Yellow Book and the Savoy. True, Rosamund did appear in the Yellow Book, but that periodical was by no means her mainstay forum among periodicals. Hughes's information reveals how Rosmund's writings appeared in many other periodicals and how closely connected she was to several such publications.

Rosamund's personal life, which at times figures in her writings, aligns her with the New Woman movement so much noticed in that day, with her three marriages, linked to an obvious repulsion from what she felt were the stifling parts in marriage (for example, the utter lack of sympathy with the arts expressed by her first husband, a man of primarily athletic pursuits), as well as with her readiness to engage in non-platonic affairs with men other than her husband of the moment.

Rosamund's heritage from the Pre-Raphaelites is also repeatedly emphasized, and in her writings on household décor and gardening, I think, she ranks with Patmore, whom Hughes only mentions (and in another context), whose interests in architecture and horticulture are better known. Rosamund's relationship with Hardy is also highlighted, as it is not, or most fleetingly, by his biographers. Not her writing alone, but her sexual allure may have appealed to him, though he was not eager to contribute to any of her literary-art projects. In terms of writing Rosamund was aligned more with Wilde, whose free-spiritedness dovetailed with so many of her own outlooks. Her predilections for ballad writing may emanate from her sense of how instinctual impulses remained near to the very opposite manifestations of civilized life that are so often termed "Victorian." Witness, for example, the lip service accorded the sanctity of marriage as against the extremely high rates of prostitution, notably child prostitution, as well as other forms of transgressive sex, in British life in the later nineteenth century.

Ultimately Hughes's book supplies us not only with a compelling unfolding of Rosamund's life, but...