Women Poets and Contested Spaces in "The Yellow Book"

SEL 44,4 (Autumn 2004): 849-872 ISSN 0039-3657 Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book LINDAK. HUGHES The Yellow Book, that most defining of 1890s periodicals, has often been approached in terms of a historical divide: B.T. and A.T., before and after the trial of Oscar Wilde. More recently, Margaret D. Stetz, Mark Samuels Lasner, and Laurel Brake have examined the periodical in terms of its marketing strategies and gender politics.1 While they certainly note and comment on po? ems appearing in the journal, no sustained analysis ofthe gendered dynamics of poetry in this premier journal has yet appeared. Several reasons suggest themselves for this neglect. Nine- teenth-century poetry retained its prestige as the most eminent of letterpress forms, given, in Pierre Bourdieu's terms, "its re? stricted audience (often only a few hundred readers), the conse- quent low profits, which make it the disinterested activity par excellence, and also its prestige, linked to the historical tradition initiated by the Romantics."2 But, as a market commodity, poetry was overshadowed by the rapidly expanding publication of nov? els and essays from the 1820s onward.3 Because those who en? tered the literary marketplace to publish poems in periodicals often failed to attain "charismatic legitimation" as eminent po? ets,4 scholars have tended to regard poetry as providing mere filler for periodicals,5 making study of periodical poetry a matter of both irrelevance and tedium. Finally, Henry Harland and John Lane's eclectic editorial strategy, which was designed to market Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at TCU in Fort Worth, works on Victorian poetry, fiction, and periodicals in the context of gender and publishing history. Her recent work includes two guest-edited special issues of Victorian Poetry ("Whither Victorian Poetry?" [Spring 2003-Winter 2004]) and a biography entitled "Graham R.: Rosamund Marriott Watson, Woman of Letters" (forthcoming).850 Women Poets in The Yellow Book the journal and Bodley Head books to a broad array of readers, as well as aestheticism's very inclusiveness and mobility, em? bracing everything from impressionist nature poems to perverse sexualities, make it difficult to theorize the collective body of po? ems appearing in the journal.6 I want to suggest, however, that Yellow Book poetry is rel? evant to a study of the gendered dynamic of fin-de-siecle poetry and of New Woman writers, in particular. Many women poets of the 1890s, including some who published in The Yellow Book, were themselves New Women who pursued full-time careers,7 ig? nored bourgeois prohibitions on female sexuality, and became vocal members of the Literary Ladies, an association formed in 1889 to promote women writers. As Stetz's analysis of Bodley Head books has demonstrated, moreover, in the 1890s Lane was astutely creating a profitable niche market for slender volumes of poems, augmenting the decade's vogue of "minor poetry."8 The development of numerous little magazines and the visibility given poetry in such venues as Andrew Lang's "At the Sign ofthe Ship" column in Longman's Magazine, W. E. Henley's National Observer, and Henry Cust's Pall Mail Gazette meant that placing poems was a journalistic opportunity for women writers bent on estab? lishing and enhancing writing careers.9 Within The Yellow Book itself', two circumstances suggest that poetry was a gendered, and contested, space: the first issue con? tained no poems by women, and no woman's poem ever fronted the volume, as did poems by Richard Le Gallienne (volume 4), William Watson (volumes 5 and 12), and W. B. Yeats (volume 13). When poems by women appeared in volume 2, this work con? tested the initial homosocial formation poetry had assumed in the debut of The Yellow Book, and I want to examine the patterns of women poets' representation relative to men's over the run of the journal. The content of both men's and women's poems was (as noted above) highly diverse,10 yet some patterns are evident here as well. Most important, women's poetry helped sustain the presence of decadent verse in the journal in the aftermath ofthe Wilde trial, especially decadent exploration of perverse sexuality that affronted bourgeois ideology and helped foreground literary style by separating art from moral content. Though I, too, oper? ate B.T. and A.T., I suggest that poems by women in The Yellow Book are most fruitfully approached in terms of four, rather than two, stages of publication history: an initial male-dominated phase (volumes 1-3); a second phase instigated by the journal's en? tanglement with decadence and the trial (volumes 4-6); an eclec-LindaK. Hughes 851 tic phase characterized by gender equity (volumes 7-12); and, in the final volume (13), a resumption of male domination in terms of numbers, yet accompanied by an integration of New Woman poetics, a synthesis of poetry's gendered dynamic throughout the journal's run. Sally Mitchell has recently summarized key issues associ? ated with New Woman writers: political efforts to enhance women's access to education, employment, and legal agency; adoption of lifestyles associated with the working class (especially employed single women living alone); women's freedom to express sexual desire; and the construction ofthe New Woman in the press.11 In the late 1880s, Wilde had supported both women's educational and employment opportunities as editor of Woman's World and, while not allotting the highest place in literature to women, none- theless endorsed "the really remarkable awakening of women's song that characterises the latter half of our century in England," which had produced poetry "of a very high standard of excel- lence."12 On both counts New Woman poets had reason to remain loyal to Wilde. They were tacitly aligned with Wilde by other means as well. By exploring female desire (always potentially transgres- sive according to bourgeois norms), New Woman poets could ex- tend the decadent project of "restless curiosity in research" that included "spiritual and moral perversity."13 And, as Linda Dowling has argued, New Women and decadents were often aligned in public minds because both wanted to dismantle hierarchies of value and privilege culture over nature, in lieu of the overdetermined roles nature suggested (whether motherhood or reproductive heterosexuality).14 At the same time, the traditional association of the female body with nature led several French decadents who exerted in? fluence on British writers (e.g., Charles Baudelaire and Joris- Karl Huysmans) to argue that women were incapable of artistic agency.15 Moreover, when no clear heirs to Matthew Arnold, Rob? ert Browning, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson had established them? selves, the emergence of numerous women poets who demanded consideration as poets rather than as poetesses?mere sponta? neous singers?was sometimes perceived by male writers as a threat. Both points are nowhere clearer than in the review of Amy Levy's posthumous poems in the 8 March 1890 issue of Henley's Scots Observer. "In woman, indeed, the capacity of art? the faculty of selection in union with the sense of style?is rarely if ever completely developed, while a gift of lyric utterance and the lyric sentiment are frequent enough . . . The Greeks once852 Women Poets in The Yellow Book figured the Muses as women; and?for the Greeks were wise? they may well have meant to signify thereby that the Muses would endure the caresses of none but men. Certain it seems that Po? etry in petticoats is only poetry on sufferance; only woman es- saying to do the man's part."16 Needless to say, such comments ignored the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the early Wilde as well as the sponsorship of some New Woman poets by male critics and poets. The review also failed to impede women's efforts to gain recognition as poets, so that by 1894 Le Gallienne claimed in an essay devoted to "Woman-Poets of the Day," "The barbarous word 'poetess' is seldom employed by any one with a literary character to lose."17 But the Scots Observer review also clarified a particular challenge faced by New Woman poets and the techniques they adopted as a result. Sincere or bald state? ment of political content would be dismissed at once as artless expression (and shrill rhetoric). Women who wanted to be taken seriously as poets perforce adopted a mask (as had Levy in "Xantippe") or relied on indirection, especially complex allusion. By these means, they could signal their radical allegiances and exert influence while gaining admittance to key literary forums such as The Yellow Book. Arthur Symons's poem about a prostitute, "Stella Maris," was the most notorious poem in volume 1 of The Yellow Book and has remained the best known. For my purposes, however, "Alere Flammam" ("To feed the flame"), by Edmund Gosse, is most rep? resentative, for it both enacts and enunciates the homosocial poetic practice that marks the journal's debut?a textual repro? duction, as it were, ofthe all-male Rhymers' Club.18Gosse's poem was dedicated to A. C. Benson, who himself contributed four quatrains under a Greek title to volume 1 depicting a woman whose placid blue eyes show "Something horrible, grey," when she succumbs to rage (Benson's subdued version of a decadent femme fatale).19 In Gosse's poem, "a tender choir / Of kindred maidens" sings in the background while "the sire as priest" sacri? fices to "a most secret deity" in a Roman temple's inner sanctum: Ah! so, untouched by windy roar Of public issues loud and long, The Poet holds the sacred door, And guards the glowing coal of song; Not his to grasp at praise or blame, Red gold, or crowns beneath the sun, His only pride to tend the flameLindaK. Hughes 853 That Homer and that Virgil won, Retain the rite, preserve the act, And pass the worship on intact.20 Clearly, the priestly ritual tropes the male poet's relation to an exclusively masculine poetic tradition. When women poets intruded on this male club in volume 2, Dollie Radford's lyric did little to challenge women's identifica? tion with sexualized objects in "Stella Maris" and other poems from volume l,21 as seen in the first stanza of her "Song": I could not through the burning day In hope prevail, Beside my task I could not stay If love should fail.22 Though woman is here a desiring subject, she is a passive one. In contrast, Radford's 1891 volume of poems had ended with a trib? ute to Olive Schreiner, and her 1895 volume published by Lane, in which "Song" was reissued, would conclude with the witty epis? tolary poem, "From Our Emancipated Aunt in Town," which gave voice to an independent single woman. Since Radford wrote about both social issues and woman's desire, did Lane and Harland demand a poem such as "Song" because it inscribed women as sexual subjects dependent on erotic passion, or was Radford merely gauging her audience after having seen volume 1 and re? sponding accordingly? Her letters to Lane about Yellow Book sub- missions merely transmit her manuscripts and typically express the "hope you will like the enclosed song for the 'Yellow Book,' and that it will appear,"23 suggesting that she had to petition to appear in the journal rather than being recruited by the pub- lisher, as some other poets were. The other contribution by a woman poet in volume 2, how? ever, "In a Gallery: Portrait of a Lady (Unknown)," by Katharine de Mattos, is clearly written from the perspective of a New Woman?and Lane had to be persuaded to publish it. Harland's 15 June 1894 letter to Lane mentions hers as "a poem which you don't like, but which [Aubrey] Beardsley and I like very much: besides she is the first cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the sister of R.A.M.S., the Pall Mall critic."24 Include it Lane did. The de Mattos poem features not one but two portraits, the woman represented on canvas and the woman observer who embodies the real secret of female subjectivity:854 Women Poets in The Yellow Book Veiled eyes, yet quick to meet one glance Not his, not yours, but mine, Lips that are fain to stir and breathe Dead joys (not love nor wine): Tis not in you the secret lurks That makes men pause and pass! And you were hungry for the hour When one should understand? Your jewelled fingers writhe and gleam From out your sombre vest; Am I the first of those who gaze, Who may their meaning guess, Yet dare not whisper lest the words Pale even painted cheeks?25 A hint of the femme fatale lingers in the reference to the image's serpentine, begemmed fingers, and the mention of maquillage strikes a decadent note (though it is not clear, interestingly, where the painted cheeks reside: in the painting? on the speaker? on the complexions of other women in the gallery or prostitutes in the street?). But the de Mattos persona also articulates a point that has become a crux of feminist scholarship,26 namely, that the gender of the gazer is a key component of aesthetic response and cultural politics. Even the woman fixed on canvas seems to know as much, for while bypassing "his" gaze she is quick to meet the glance ofthe speaker?or so the speaker wittily claims. The poem also displaces masculine constructs of feminine mys? tery (most famously articulated in Walter Pater's description of the Mona Lisa in Studies in the History of the Renaissance)27 in favor ofan open feminist secret that gives men pause: a woman's ability to adjudicate aesthetic representation, especially of other women, on independent terms. If the speaker declines to disclose in the public pages of the text just what the portrait means to her, this not only leaves her secret intact but also forces her own readers to replicate her stance, puzzling the matter out for them? selves. The poetry of the second volume of The Yellow Book may be male dominated in terms of numbers (six male poets com? pared to two women) and outlook (with John Davidson's 'Thirty Bob a Week" an admirable exception), but the de Mattos poem interrogates the poetic homosociality found in volume 1. Of course, this challenge had to be sanctioned by the journal's editors, andLindaK. Hughes 855 the inclusion of "In a Gallery" in volume 2 exemplifies the point made by Stetz about Yellow Book fiction: Lane (largely assisted by Ella D'Arcy) cultivated diversity and even literary contests as a way of widening his audience and producing frissons or scan- dals that sold well.28 The second phase of the publishing history of women's po? etry in The Yellow Book, in volumes 4-6, hinges on decadence and the Wilde trial. Poetry in volume 4 is persistently decadent: Charles Sydney belittles hypocritical Philistines and invokes the rapacious desires of a woman whom the male speaker plots sa- distically to overpower in 'Two Songs" ("justice on her lips I'U wreak: / I'U teach my love to know the right, / And not oppress the meek!"); Charles Newton-Robinson addresses a classical femme fatale in "Hor. Car. I. 5" ("Yes, like a witch in her cave, you sit. . . [and] snares for souls of men you knit"); and in "Proem to The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender,'" Davidson insists on the need to laugh in an era of cultural decline, when "On our sleeves we wear our sexes, / Our diseases, unashamed."29 The woman writer Dolf Wyllarde,30 whose sole contribution to The Yellow Book appeared in volume 4, celebrates passionate, nightlong lovemaking that gives way to sated disillusionment in "Rondeaux d'Amour"; if this work flouts female codes of reticence, it otherwise presents lines virtually indistinguishable from simi? lar poems by male contributors. Graham R. Tomson's revenant poem "Vespertilia," however, engages in decadence only to re- fashion it in feminine terms as a representation of male erotic failure, less from impotence than from psychological timidity.31 Edith Nesbit's "Day and Night" in the same volume stages a simi? lar intervention. On the surface a nature poem describing night- fall after the burning rays of the sun fade away, "Day and Night" tropes this natural process as an adulterous woman who duti- fully, if unenthusiastically, submits to the embraces of her hus? band while secretly awaiting the more compelling visit of her lover: All day the glorious Sun caressed Wide meadows and white winding way, And on the Earth's soft heaving breast Heart-warm his royal kisses lay. She looked up in his face and smiled, With mists of love her face seemed dim; The golden Emperor was beguiled, To dream she would be true to him.856 Women Poets in The Yellow Book Yet was there, 'neath his golden shower, No end of love for him astir; She waited, dreaming, for the hour When Night, her love, should come to her; When 'neath Night's mantle she would creep And feel his arms about her cling, When the soft tears true lovers weep Should make amends for everything.32 Nesbit here participates in decadence insofar as she celebrates transgressive sexual acts involving effeminate masculinity: the night, usually gendered feminine (in contrast to the virile power of the day), is here a seductive, sexually knowing presence that best understands how to make love to a woman. But Nesbit's poem also chimes with that of de Mattos in suggesting the pair? ing of female agency and female secrecy in contrast to the female mystery and instrumental sexual availability often found in male decadent verse. Earth's dutiful smile to her lord the sun is a deceptive screen that allows the female figure to fulfill her sexual desires on her own terms, transforming apparent masculine domi? nance into a manipulated male presence merely tolerated by the female in control. Between the publication of volume 4 in January 1895 and volume 5 (originally scheduled for the first of April but delayed until the end ofthe month),33 catastrophe befell Wilde, arrested with a yellow-backed novel in hand, and then Beardsley, whose tenure as art editor of The Yellow Book was brought to an end after William Watson and Wilfrid Meynell pressured Lane to fire him.34 In response to the link between sodomy and yellow books, decadence and degeneration, which press coverage of Wilde's ar? rest had established, male contributors to volume 5 erupted in a frenzy of hypermasculine verse. The number opened with Watson's "Hymn to the Sea," which adopted Algernon Charles Swinburne's cadences (but not Swinburnean politics) to intone the sea as a source of "the spirit of man, / Nature's wooer and fighter," and culminated in piety: "Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error and cancelled, / Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness of God."35 Le Gallienne offered up a short, deco- rous love lyric, and Gosse relinquished the joys of homosocial literary discourse to emphasize a different form of patriarchal lineage, his dual roles as father and son in 'The Ring of Life" (a preview of his 1907 memoir). Other contributions included a Zi- onist poem by B. Paul Neuman ("Pro Patria"), an invocation ofaLinda K. Hughes 857 masculine sword of power by Richard Garnett ("The Sword of Caesar Borgia"), and a celebration by W. A. Mackenzie ofthe val? ues associated with Oliver Goldsmith, which help a youth over? whelmed by urban chaos keep to the path of virtue ("'Here Lies Oliver Goldsmith'"). It is the women poets who look in another direction. Tomson resurfaced in volume 5 as Rosamund Marriott Watson as a result of practicing the freedoms Nesbit had celebrated in "Day and Night";36 but to accompany the anarchic instability of her names and erotic attachments, she contributed otherwise chaste verse ("Two Songs") that evoked love so intense it persisted into the grave and that lamented the passage of youth. Nora Hopper tilted more overtly toward decadence and the work of Swinburne and Pater in "Shepherds' Song," which restated paganism's greater vibrancy in contrast to Christianity's suppression of sensuous pleasure. The shepherds of Hopper's title lament that Diana ends her chase, Giving place To a maid with softer eyes, Colder breast. They staunchly prefer Diana ('"Maiden rule we still obey? / Yet we loved the first maid best'"), a kind of divine femme fatale who might terrorize them with the threat of her arrows but at least enables them to die "'On her breast.'"37 Leila Macdonald's "Refrains," I suggest, went even further to register recognition of and sympathy for Wilde, who was still lan- guishing in Holloway Prison after the close of his first trial for sodomy when volume 5 of The Yellow Book went to press.38 The epigraph to Macdonald's poem?". . . Whereupon, coming to the bars of his window and looking out, he did begin to weep and lament him, and cry out on the good sun that shone even into the King's prison. But most he did bewail that no one should pay heed to his death.. ."39?recalls the Pre-Raphaelite treatment ofa knight prisoner in William Morris's "A Good Knight in Prison" (1858), while her title merely names the concluding repetition (in italics) of each tercet's first line, a means of suggesting that the impris? oned man's radical isolation causes his words to reverberate in both the cell and his own mind. In these respects, "Refrains" might easily be judged merely decorous, even decorative. Placed in its original publication context, however, the poem's insistence on the incommensurateness ofthe speaker's crime with his pun-858 Women Poets in The Yellow Book ishment ("What have I done that I should die, who never meant to wrong?"), its mention of shame ("If only some one will recall my memory and my name; / I do so fear they may forget even my very shame"), and its investment in hope that a woman will sym- pathize with the imprisoned man ("Perchance a girl may weep to see them lead me out to die, / May cross herself, and whisper, 'God, he is as young as I'") all suggest the woman poet's own sympathetic response to fellow poet Wilde.40 Davidson's "Fleet Street Eclogue," which follows the women poets' contributions and concludes volume 5, participates both in the women poets' protest against social institutions and the hearty masculinity enunciated by the volume's other male poets. Menzies, the eclogue's principal speaker, protests that English- ness itself is hypocrisy and expresses outrage on behalf of the poor and outcast, including 'The prisoner, cursing in his cell" and dissident women: I hear the broker cheapen love; I hear poor ladies crying out For license men are weary of. Menzies's protests, however, are countered by the imperialist, xenophobic rejoinders ("some have stolen fire from France") of his five male companions until even Menzies himself is caught up in hypermasculine patriotism: though we wander far astray, And oft in utter darkness grope, Fearless we face the roughest day, For we [English] are the world's forlorn hope.41 Davidson's cynical Menzies is thus recuperated for the cause of patriarchal masculinity, so that the poetry of volume 5 ended as it began. The effect on the volume's readers is suggested by the response of North American Charles Eliot Norton, who empha- sized the poem's manliness even while denigrating its publica? tion venue in a letter to his daughter: "the best poem . . . is 'A Fleet Street Eclogue,' by John Davidson, which was privately printed by Mr. Lane, the publisher ofthe 'Yellow Book,' when he was here a month or two ago, and which now appears alas! in the wretched Y.B. itself,?a vile place for a manly, hearty genuine- English poem, with no touch of decadence in it."42 Despite theLinda K. Hughes 859 eclogue's "manly" close, however, many of Menzies's lines form a bridge to the poems by women, who themselves most overtly sus? tained the journal's links to decadence in the wake of the trial. That this task fell to women is in some respects unsurprising. Though some ostensibly New Women distanced themselves from Wilde after his arrest,43 women were, from an editorial perspec? tive, a surer conduit than men for material associated with him. The trial was a reminder of the high stakes of masculinity in securing bourgeois regimes of gender and morality; women, al? ready marginal, could more safely articulate thoughts that had become dangerous for men. Still, if the poems of Hopper and Macdonald worked in service to Lane's publishing interests by providing provocative material that circumscribed risk, they were also voicing women's own poetic ambitions and resistance to so? cial norms. Both ofthe poems contributed by Rosamund Marriott Watson and Radford to volume 6 envision escape from imprisoning con? fines, an implicit echo of Macdonald's "Refrains" in volume 5.44 In both, moreover, these confines represent limits on sexual free? dom, another means by which the two women's poems can evoke Wilde and his unsanctioned desires. Marriott Watson's "The Golden Touch" presents a woman trapped in 'The limits of my narrow room" amidst "sterile shadow[s]" who, on hearing a caged bird sing, finds "My prisoning bars, transfigured too," which then melt away to admit the envisioned lover whose material presence is obstructed and perhaps forbidden. The speaker of Radford's song escapes the enclosure of a "hedge of roses" after hearing laughter and seeing a "flower-face": bound no more by roses, I break my barrier through, And leave all it encloses, Dear one, to follow you.45 Here, unlike in volume 2, Radford's speaker is an active rather than passive sexual subject. If Marriott Watson's and Radford's poems glance toward Wilde in their celebration of escape from prison into sensual freedom, they also seem to invoke heterosexual contexts. Olive Custance's "A Madrigal," in contrast, most overtly sustains decadence in volume 6 by hinting at the delights of same-sex desire, especially if the speaker is presumed to be female (like the poet writing under signature). The Custance poem once again pairs female860 Women Poets in The Yellow Book transgression with female secrets, as de Mattos and Nesbit had in earlier volumes. The speaker pleads with a "sweet maid" to leave secret, subterranean thoughts undisturbed: Ah! leave my soul like forest pool In shadow smiling unafraid? Let not, I pray, thy sunlike hair Pierce to the thoughts that slumber there! Clearly, the hidden thoughts are erotic: My soul is silent?trouble not Its secret reveries with thy songs. The rare red tint thy lips have got! The whole world longs To kiss them?therefore speak not, dear; My soul must struggle, should it hear. In the concluding stanza, separated from prior lines only by the flimsy pretense of an ellipsis, the speaker abandons self-control and revels in the pleasures of mutual desire and song: I see thee, and my soul is swung In golden trances of delight; I hear thee, and my tremulous tongue Hurls forth a flight Of bird-like songs, saluting thee. Oh, come and dwell and dream with me.46 In notable contrast to this poetic construct of spontaneously over- flowing lesbian desire, the first and last poems contributed by men to volume 6 emphasize piety and the angelic woman: in "Earth's Complines" by Charles G. D. Roberts, the speaker sees 'The image of God's face" in the mingled souls of man and na? ture, while Theodore Watts pays tribute to the angelic qualities of Le Gallienne's late wife in "Two Letters to a Friend."47 Same-sex desire is strictly contained within sapphic bounds, but by this means The Yellow Book could extend its avant-garde associa- tions alongside bows to normative middle-class values. Because so few letters detailing editorial policy survive, it is impossible to reconstruct Harland and Lane's motives in appor-LindaK. Hughes 861 tioning poems in The Yellow Book, either in volumes 5 and 6 or in the numbers that followed. Did they see the value of women po? ets in transmitting content increasingly dangerous for men? Did they determine that a mix of poetic offerings by men and women had the most tenable market position? Or were they merely seek? ing an editorial direction of some kind after the chaos induced by Wilde's arrest? Most likely, all three elements governed their edi? torial selections. Mere numbers of men's and women's poems in volumes 7-12, the third phase ofthe journal, certainly indicate a shift to gender equity. Whereas, for example, volume 3 had featured nine male and four women poets and volume 5 ten male and three women poets (see Table 1), volumes 7-12 featured equitable representation and on occasion even a slight edge for women poets. Aestheticist poetry continued to dominate contributions by both men and women, with occasional forays into decadence amid an otherwise eclectic mix of offerings?including Kenneth Grahame's mock elegy on a dead puppy in volume 12. Some of the women's poems in this third phase of The Yellow Boofc's pub- lishing history, moreover, were quite conventional; "Finger-Posts" by Eva Gore-Booth (volume 10) is a kind of female version of William Watson's sententious poetry. Yet NewWoman poems con? tinued to appear alongside such work. The situation of de Mattos's "In a Gallery" was reprised in volume 7 in "To the Bust of the Pompeian Coelia" by Macdonald, in which the speaker positions herself as a female connoisseur and gazer who identifies with the Table 1. Gender distribution of Yellow Book poetry862 Women Poets in The Yellow Book objectified female image she contemplates. The poem concedes woman's sexual allure: You bought men's worship with a glance; Like shaded fire, its languorous power. Ah, cruel eyes! And the speaker voyeuristically envisions Pompeian women undraping for the bath: maidens to the bath repair. They smiling stand, Throw off the veilings of their grace, And court the waters' cool embrace. But the poem also credits the sculpted figure with complex sub? jectivity, juxtaposing her seductive glances with the prayers she offers to the Goddess for her children or lover, and concluding with the woman's radiance rather than any malign mystery: Alas, my Coelia, you, whose grace Has perished with the silent Time, Accept this homage of a rhyme, Paid to where stone reflects your face. For stone may show Not all Vesuvius could eclipse The sunshine of your smiling lips.48 In volume 9 Hopper, who had earlier contributed Celtic Twi? light poems (volumes 3 and 8) as well as "Shepherds' Song" (vol? ume 5), echoed the revenant theme Tomson had explored in "Vespertilia" (volume 4). "Wolf-Edith" is set in Saxon times, its revenant a soldier who fell fighting against the Normans and now haunts the title character. If Edith is a child of nature seduced by the revenant ("her sleeping soul he hath set aflame"), she is also a woman poet with power over ordinary men: Her lips know songs that will lure away A dull-eared clown from his buxom may. But never a man she hath hearkened sing And followed home from her wandering?Linda K. Hughes 863 And never a man the bents above Might call Wolf-Edith his mate and love.49 The repeated line that serves as an irregular refrain and con? cludes the poem, "Wild Wolf-Edith has found her a love," empha? sizes both Edith's uncivilized rudeness and her erotic agency; she is sexualized, as in many poems by male contributors, but she is outside the orbit of conventional masculine accessibility and control. Custance's 'The White Statue" repudiates conventional het? erosexual union altogether in volume 11 and is the most transgressively decadent poem in the third phase of The Yellow Book: I love you, silent statue: for your sake My songs in prayer up-reach Frail hands of flame-like speech, That some mauve-silver twilight you make wake! I love you more than swallows love the south. As sunflowers turn and turn Towards the sun, I yearn To press warm lips against your cold white mouth. I love you most at purple sunsetting, When night with feverish eyes Comes up the fading skies . . . I love you with a passion past forgetting!50 Even if the poem is read as a version of the Pygmalion story that inspired poetry and paintings by Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, the lyric suggests gender reversal?a female artist and male statue?or lesbian desire for a female sculpted image. At the very least, 'The White Statue" imbues the woman speaker with aes? thetic and erotic agency, and at its most disturbing, its cold marble and heated lips suggest a woman's "perverse" sexual acts with a sexual fetish. Women's poems published from October 1895 to January 1897, then, acted (albeit intermittently) to sustain Yel? low Book ties to the avant-garde and to provide an outlet by which women writers could challenge social convention or misogynist contributions by men. When volume 13 appeared in April 1897, there was no hint that it marked the end of The Yellow Book. Instead, its poetic864 Women Poets in The Yellow Book offerings looked back to its first phase of publication, at least in terms of numbers of poems contributed by men and women: only Custance and Marriott Watson variegated the space occupied by eight male contributors. Masculine poetic prestige, moreover, was foregrounded by the positioning of Yeats's 'The Blessed" at the front of the number and by Douglas Ainslie's "The Death of Verlaine," which paid homage to the French poet and presented him as a poetic monarch transmitting his poetic legacy to heirs: Then Lelian, king ofthe land, Rich Lelian will teach us the speech That here we but half understand? Kind Lelian will reach us his hand.51 But equally notable in the volume are poems in which men share the writing practices of women. In this respect, even after the number of women contributors diminished, women continued to influence the offerings of the journal at the end of its run. In contrast to Ainslie's salute to masculine poetic tradition, for ex? ample, Garnett implied indebtedness to women writers, since his "Sonnets from the Portuguese of Anthereo de Quental" inevitably recalled the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning; indeed, Garnett's short sequence ends where Barrett Browning's had begun, with an expectation of death reversed by the arrival of love. Stephen Phillips's 'The Question" seems directly indebted to New Woman writers, as well as to Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts and the homosexual panic inspired by the Wilde trial:52 I Father, beneath the moonless night, This heavy stillness without light, There comes a thought which I must speak; Why is my body then so weak? Why do I falter in the race, And flag behind this mighty pace? Why is my strength so quickly flown? And hark! My mother sobs alone! II My son, when I was young and free, When I was filled with sap and glee,Linda K. Hughes 865 I squandered here and there my strength, And to thy mother's arms at length Weary I came and over-tired; With fever all my bones were fired. Therefore so soon thy strength is flown, Therefore thy mother sobs alone. The son sired in "languor" implores his father to put him away as a malformed creature, but the father can offer only patriarchal cliches in response: "life is so, nor sigh; / We cannot run from destiny. / Then fire thy strength that's quickly flown."53 Though the poem is a homosocial dialogue that excludes women and seems to support sexual regulation, it turns on a scenario of male vice and disease transmitted to innocent women and children that novelist Sarah Grand might have envisioned in The Heavenly Twins. Given the infiltration of male verse by female writing prac? tices in the final issue, it is appropriate that Yellow Book poems ended with Rosamund Marriott Watson's "Oasis": Joy comes once more; once more through the wet leaves swinging Vistas of silver and blue in the birch-woods gleam; In the dusk of the cold spring dawn with a blackbird singing? Singing the Song of Songs by the Gates of Dream.54 The blackbird carols a biblical song of desire in a pagan setting of dreams and evanescence, at once an exuberant and marginal singer?ain apt trope for women poets in The Yellow Book. Periodical publication is notorious for its radically mediated discourse: authors can publish only what editors accept and have to compete with other contributors for place and a distinctive voice. Journals themselves, moreover, survive only so long as distribution, advertising, and audience interest ensure sales. These conditions intensified constraints on New Woman writers in the literary marketplace, especially when all too few editors and owners were women. Reconstructing the history of New Woman periodical poetry is itself a contested activity. The motives of both authors and editors can only be inferred and are often ambiguous at best. Extant correspondence indicates that female poets quickly rec? ognized the value of appearing in The Yellow Book and sought admission. Tomson was writing to Lane soon after the journal866 Women Poets in The Yellow Book debuted and was impatient at the delay when "Vespertilia" failed to appear in volume 2 or 3, while Nesbit playfully but insistently wrote Lane in October 1894, "The enclosed poem earnes[t]ly de- sires to be placed in The 'Yellow Book.' Can you aid it in its laud- able aspiration?"55 Yet Lane also recruited some women contributors; a letter from Gore-Booth mentions Lane's being "kind enough to encourage me to think that [?] you might perhaps take something of mine in the Yellow Book," while Alma Strettell (amidst dunning Lane for payment?a not infrequent source of letters to him from parties of either gender) remarks, "you may recollect you wrote asking me to send something for [The Yellow Book], & in a hurry I sent 2 poems, both of which you used."56 From such scant evidence, we cannot infer that women had to clamor for admission to The Yellow Book, nor that Lane published only what he had solicited. We can, however, be more certain that he ac? cepted poems because he liked them, or because they were the only material he had on hand, or because he thought they would enhance sales, since poetry was expensive to publish. As Harland remarked to Lane in a letter regarding the second volume, "Of course the average [cost] is raised by poetry?where we may pay as much as five guineas, and can never pay less than one guinea, for a single poem that may not cover more than one page."57 Amidst so much that is unclear, however, it is also important to remember that periodical publication freed New Woman poets to express radical content and intervene in contemporary debates via individual poems, the visibility of which could diminish when authors collected a wide range of poems in bound volumes that bore no evident relationship to contemporary events.58 Both peri? odicals and poems, then, were important media for New Woman writers. But the women were also important to the periodicals, whether as professional writers, purchasers, or readers. Estab- lishing the role of New Woman poets in The Yellow Book creates a more nuanced account of its literary and sexual politics than the usual narrative whereby its daring B.T. overture (volumes 1-4) gave way to A.T. timid conventionality. In entering the contested spaces of The Yellow Book, women poets enhanced their own ca- reers even while they complicated, challenged, and influenced the avant-garde content ofthe journal over the course of its pub- lishing history.Linda K. Hughes 867 NOTES I wish to thank Sharon Harris, Karen Steele, and Margaret D. Stetz for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1 Margaret Diane Stetz, "Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth: Bookselling at the Bodley Head in the Eighteen-Nineties," VS35, 1 (Autumn 1991): 71-86; Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (Washington DC: Georgetown Univ. Press, 1990); and Laurel Brake, "Endgames: The Politics of The Yellow Book or, Decadence, Gender, and the New Journalism," in Essays and Studies 1995: The Endings ofEp- ochs, ed. Brake (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 38-64. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), p. 51. 3 See Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 3, 10-1. According to Simon Eliot, the market share of poetry and drama in the 1890s increased, but only very slightly [Some Pat? terns and Trends in British Publishing, 1800-1919, Occasional Papers ofthe Bibliographical Society 8 [London: Bibliographical Society, 1994], p. 50). 4 Bourdieu, p. 51. See also Brake, Walter Pater (Plymouth UK: Northcote House, 1994), p. 38; and Antony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and the Politics of Culture: Discourse and Ideology (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 11. Both remark on the continuing cultural prestige of poetry despite its restricted market share of sales. 5 A. Brisau, for example, identifies William Butler Yeats as the only ma? jor poet to appear in The Yellow Book and, while noting recurrent themes of eroticism, disillusionment, and weariness among poems by other contribu? tors, finds little originality in their work?and too much "grandiloquent bom- bast" ("The Yellow Book and Its Place in the Eighteen-Nineties," SGG8 [1966]: 135-72, 157-68). 6 James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 150-1; Stetz, "Debating Aestheticism from a Feminist Perspective," in Women and British Aestheti- cism, ed. Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 25-43, 29-30; and Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 2-7. 7See, e.g., Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, "New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siecle," Women; A Cultural Review 10, 1 (1999): 22- 34, and the anthology edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain, Poetry ofthe 1890s (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1997). 8 Stetz, "Sex, Lies, and Printed Cloth," pp. 72-4. 9 lan Fletcher, "Decadence and the Little Magazines," in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Fletcher, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 17, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 173- 202, 174. Katharine Tynan, herself a contributor to both the "Wares of Autolycus" and poetry columns of the Pall Mail Gazette, asserts that Henry Cust's poetry column published the "best to be had ofthe young literature";868 Women Poets in The Yellow Book "How we looked for the poem?'Occ Verse' as it was irreverently called in the composing room" (TheMiddle Years [London: Constable, 1916], pp. 112, 117). 10 If, for example, Olive Custance contributed decadent poems suggest? ing lesbian desire or a sexual fetish, some of her poems in The Yellow Book are sweetly feminine impressions of nature (as in "The Waking of Spring" in volume 4 and "Sunshine" in volume 9). Though contributing spirited poems in other volumes, Leila Macdonald participated in the objectification of women in "Red Rose" (volume 4), and Frances Nicholson's "Wait!" (volume 8) begins as an impressionist poem but concludes with sententious moralizing about Nature's lesson of "silence?work?hope?waif (January 1896: 372), a les? son that would quell New Women altogether if taken to heart. I do not pro- pose, then, that women poets were invariably a feminist or progressive presence in The Yellow Book 11 Sally Mitchell, "New Women, Old and New," VLC 27, 2 (1999): 579-88, 580-4. 12Anya Clayworth, "TTie Woman's World: Oscar Wilde as Editor," VPR30, 2 (Summer 1997): 84-101, 89, 95-6; Barbara Kanner, Women in English Social History 1800-1914: A Guide to Research, 3 vols. (New York and Lon? don: Garland, 1990), 1:48; Wilde, "English Poetesses," Queen 74, 8 Decem- ber 1888 (rprt. in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann [New York: Random House, 1968], pp. 101-8, 105). For a sampling of the substantial body of New Woman poems authored in the 1890s, see New Woman Poets: An Anthology, ed. Linda K. Hughes (London: Eighteen Nineties Society, 2001). There are complex reasons for the relative invisibility of such poems in scholarship on New Woman writers, ranging from the importance of narrative analysis in feminist studies to the obfusca- tion of New Woman poems that resulted when they were widely scattered amidst more traditional lyrics within individual volumes. For further analy? sis of New Woman poetry, see the introduction to New Woman Poets (pp. 1- 11) and Vadillo, "Women Poets and the Aesthetics of Space and Transport at the Fin de Siecle" (Ph.D. diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2000). 13 Arthur Symons, 'The Decadent Movement in Literature," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November 1893 (rprt. in Aesthetes and Decadents ofthe 1890's:An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, ed. Karl Beckson, rev. edn. [Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1993], pp. 134-51, 135). 14 Linda Dowling, 'The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890's," NCF33, 4 (March 1979): 434-53, 437-41. 15 Symons, pp. 147-8; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 170. 16 "Poetry in Petticoats," Scots Observer, 8 March 1890, pp. 438-9. De? spite such misogynist pronouncements, W. E. Henley published poems by Alice Meynell, Graham R. Tomson, Tynan, and Edith Nesbit, each of whom wrote New Woman poems at some point in their careers. 17 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 90; Richard Le Gallienne, "Woman-Poets of the Day," English Illustrated Magazine (April 1894): 648-57, 650. Andrew Lang promoted May Kendall and Tomson in his monthly causerie in Longman's Magazine, "At the Sign of the Ship," while Symons edited the poems of Mathilde Blind after her death. Despite Le Gallienne's endorsement of women as poets, he nonetheless judgedLinda K. Hughes 869 their work according to the rubric of spontaneous singing and chided Blind for abandoning lyricism in favor of daring scientific speculation, Tomson for excessive concern with form and tradition rather than emotional vitality (pp. 653-5). 18 In all, ten of the thirteen volumes of The Yellow Book included poems celebrating literary tradition as a homosocial male club. In addition to Edmund Gosse's "Alere Flammam," other relevant titles are Austin Dobson's "Sat Est Scripsisse" (volume 2), Morton Fullerton's "George Meredith" (volume 3), C. W. Dalmon's "Parson Herrick's Muse" (volume 3), Charles Newton-Robinson's "Hor. Car. I. 5" (volume 4), W. A. Mackenzie's "'Here Lies Oliver Goldsmith'" (listed as "Oliver Goldsmith's Grave" in the table of contents for volume 5), A. C. Benson's "SicTuRecoliMerearisV, (listed only as "A Sonnet" in the table of contents for volume 7), Benson's "Rest" (invoking pastoral tradition in vol? ume 8), Richard Garnett's "Two Sonnets from Petrarch" (volume 9), Garnett's "An Emblem of Translation" (volume 10), and Douglas Ainslie's "The Death of Verlaine" (volume 13). The preponderance of titles in this list drawn from classical languages reinforces the tie to masculinity (as do titles naming prominent male writers), since males represented an overwhelming majority of those who gained access to training in Latin and Greek. 19 Arthur Christopher Benson, "Daimonizsmenod," Yellow Book 1 (April 1894): 83. 20Gosse, "Alere Flammam," Yellow Book 1 (April 1894): 153-4. 21 As Brake observes, this poem and other material in The Yellow Book acted to fix women as sexualized creatures defined in terms of their bodies and heterosexual relations ("Endgames," pp. 44, 49-50, 53). 22Dollie Radford, "Song," Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 116. 23Radford ALS to John Lane, 11 June 1895. John Lane Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas; qtd. by per? mission of Ann MacEwen. 24 Henry Harland ALS to Lane, 15 June n.y. John Lane Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas. Ironically, as the exchange indicates, this woman's poem asserting female agency appeared only because two men?Harland and Aubrey Beardsley?authorized its con? tent and persuaded a third man to go along with their editorial decision. The Katharine de Mattos poem at once contests homosocial formations and is mediated by them. 25 De Mattos, "In a Gallery: Portrait ofa Lady (Unknown)," Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 177-8. 26See, e.g., Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, ed. Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 158-66, 162-3; Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 108, 113-5, 135; and Lynne Pearce, Woman/ Image/Text: Readings in Pre-Raphaelite Art and Literature (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1991), pp. 1-3. 27 Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), pp. 118-9. 28 Stetz, "Debating Aestheticism," pp. 29-30. 29 Charles Sydney, "Two Songs," Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 189-90, 189; Newton-Robinson, "Hor. Car. I. 5," Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 202;870 Women Poets in The Yellow Book John Davidson, "Proem to The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender,'" Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 284-5, 284. 30Katherine Mix identifies Dolf Wyllarde as a woman writer based on the archives of A. P. Watt. As Mix notes, Wyllarde went on to author some forty novels in her career (A Study in Yellow: The "Yellow Book" and Its Contribu? tors [Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1960], p. 128). Wyllarde also pub? lished later volumes of verse with Lane. 31 Hughes, "Feminizing Decadence: Poems by Graham R. Tomson," in Women and British Aestheticism, pp. 119-38. 32Nesbit, "Day and Night," Yellow Book 4 (January 1895): 234. 33 Mix, p. 147; Stanley Weintraub, "The Yellow Book: A Reappraisal," JGE 16, 2 (July 1964): 136-52, 146. 34 Mix provides an account ofthe details (pp. 142-7). 35 William Watson, "Hymn to the Sea," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 11-8, 12, 18. There is more than a little reflexive irony in Watson's penultimate line, given the editorial detection of "error" and ensuing "cancellation" in the original artwork of volume 5 after peremptory threats by Watson and Meynell to leave the Bodley Head press if Beardsley was not dismissed. Intriguingly, the beginning of stanza 4 strikes another reflexive note relative to the publi? cation history of volume 5, given Watson's odd word choice to describe hu? man instability in contrast to nature's unwavering law: "Yea, it is we, light perverts, that waver, and shift our allegiance" (p. 17). 36 See Hughes, "Rosamund Marriott Watson," in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, ed. William B. Thesing, Dictio? nary of Literary Biography 240 (Detroit: Gale, 2001), pp. 308-20, for a full account. 37Nora Hopper, "Shepherds' Song," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 189-90. 38 Ellmann, p. 458. 39Macdonald, "Refrains," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 130-1, 130. El- lipses as found in the original document. 40Macdonald, "Refrains," 131. Stetz reports parallel instances of Bodley Head authors who responded obliquely but sympathetically to Wilde after his trials and imprisonment; see "'Mrs. John Lane' of the Bodley Head: The Business of Domesticity in a New Century," JENS 28 (2001): 19-28, 21. 41 Davidson, "Fleet Street Eclogue," Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 299-317, 301, 303, 305, 316. 42 Charles Eliot Norton, qtd. in Mix, p. 118. 43 Stetz, "Oscar Wilde and 'Modern' Women" (paper presented at the Os? car Wilde Symposium, Magdalen College, Oxford, 15-7 September 2000). Sally Ledger notes that while New Woman writers were often linked along with Wilde to decadent sexuality, many (by no means all) of these women took care to distance themselves from any hint of sexual impropriety ('The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism," in Cultural Politics at the uFin de Siecle", ed. Ledger and Scott McCracken [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995], pp. 22-44, 30). 44 Stetz also suggests that Garnett's "Justice" in volume 6 of The Yellow Book functions similarly to Macdonald's "Refrains" in volume 5 (personal communication). The figure of Justice in Garnett's poem reassures her audi- tor that fairness prevails through the "Law sublime," an apparent defense of the status quo. Yet the poem's speaker bewails the departure of Justice fromLinda K. Hughes 871 earth, and the poem's closing lines can imply that justice is not always done in the present but depends on the passage of time to emerge, a potential expression of sympathy for Wilde. 45Rosamund Marriott Watson, 'The Golden Touch," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 77; Radford, "A Song," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 121-2. Rose Haig Thomas's "Mars" in the same volume (pp. 249-52) is another kindred work, celebrating escape into fantasy, though freedom is gained here only in fan? tasy. 46Custance, "A Madrigal," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 215-6. Both Vir? ginia Blain and Brocard Sewell remark on Custance's affair with Natalie Clifford Barney prior to wedding Lord Alfred Douglas. See Blain, "Sexual Politics ofthe (Victorian) Closet; or, No Sex Piease?We're Poets," in Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Blain (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 135-63, 139; Sewell, Olive Custance: Her Life and Work (London: Eighteen Nineties Soci? ety, 1975), pp. 12-3. Those readers acquainted with Custance and her ro? mantic relationship with Barney would likely have brought a lesbian framework to this poem in The Yellow Book: even readers unacquainted with Custance might have recognized a resemblance between the situation of "A Madrigal" and poetic fragments by Sappho as well as poems by Michael Field in Long Ago (1889), a gathering of lyrics inspired by Sapphic fragments. 47Charles G. D. Roberts, "Earth's Complines," YellowBook6 (July 1895): 60-1, 61; Theodore Watts, "Two Letters to a Friend," Yellow Book 6 (July 1895): 333-5. 48 Macdonald, To the Bust ofthe Pompeian Ccelia," Yellow Book 7 (Octo? ber 1895): 117-9. 49Hopper, "Wolf-Edith," Yellow Book 9 (April 1896): 57-9. 50Custance, 'The White Statue," Yellow Book 11 (October 1896): 91. 51 Ainslie, The Death of Verlaine," Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 194-6, 196. 52 Mix notes the similarity in theme between "The Question" and the Henrik Ibsen play (p. 246). 53 Stephen Phillips, The Question," Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 74-5. 54Rosamund Marriott Watson, "Oasis," Yellow Book 13 (April 1897): 212. 55Tomson ALS to Lane, n.d., and Nesbit ALS to Lane, 15 October 1894. John Lane Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The Univer? sity of Texas. Tomson's letter can be dated before June 1894, since in that month she eloped with H. B. Marriott Watson and began using the signature Rosamund Marriott Watson. An October letter of that year (Rosamund Marriott Watson ALS to Lane) seeks Lane's help in expediting the publication of "Vespertilia" and now implies that Lane had himself solicited a poem from her in the spring; the Marriott Watson letter also indicates that Harland set aside "Vespertilia" from volume 2 because of its length. 56Eva Gore-Booth ALS to Lane, 11 August n.y., qtd. by permission of Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth; Alma Strettell ALS to Lane, 7 June n.y. John Lane Pa? pers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, qtd. by permission of Peter Harrison. Strettell contributed a number of fine translations of impressionist verse from the French of Emile Verhaeren. 57 Harland ALS to Lane, 15 June [1894]. John Lane Papers, Harry Ran? som Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas. Here Harland872 Women Poets in The Yellow Book reveals the paradox that the very feature of poetry that made it cheap to print in volume form, its slender dispersal of print per page (Nelson, p. 85), made it expensive to print in a periodical such as The Yellow Book. In the same letter, Harland's accounting of fees paid to authors for volume 3 indi- cates that Symons received two guineas for the two-page "Credo," Custance a guinea for the somewhat shorter "Twilight," and Davidson six guineas for 'The Ballad of a Nun," which ran to seven pages. 58 The exceptions were volumes with express political intent, such as Liberty Lyrics, a collection of anarchist lyrics by Louisa Bevington (London: James Tochatti, "Liberty" Press, 1895).