The Yellow Book created quite the scandalous name for itself from its promiscuous images of un-attended women and masquerades, to the defamation of  Beardsley, former art editor, being guilty by association to Oscar Wilde, who was arrested for homosexuality. Being the center for Fin de Siecle studies, The Yellow Book has periodically published 13 volumes from the years 1894-1897, indulging its artwork and literature with avant garde practices (Lasner 4). 


         For my exhibit in Situating The Yellow Book Image, Text and Context, I will be examining David Cameron's "Vanity" (The Yellow Book Vol. 13) and Evelyn Sharp’s “The Other Anna” (The Yellow Book Vol. 13) in the cultural context of 1890’s women, class, and art. Evelyn Sharp was a women suffragist and feminist that sought out women’s equality and the right to vote (Devine 22). She has published several short stories in The Yellow Book and 4 novels, often concluding that her heroine should be able to rescue themselves from lonely towers instead of waiting for princes (Angela 10). “The Other Anna” is a fictional short story that focuses on women’s representation throughout The Yellow Book and the 1890’s as the women’s roles were being altered due to the New Woman movement. D. Y. Cameron was a popular artist at the time of The Yellow Book’s release as his work ranged from landscaping, oil and water paintings that were auctioned off from £40-£200, roughly $5,266-$26,333 in today’s currency (Rinder 55). My chosen image, a portrait created in 1896 by pencil and then photo engraved into The Yellow Book, was an experimental sketch since Cameron’s primary work is not on people and displayed the vividness of a women’s potential for vanity.   

           My cultural context, 1890’s women, class, and art  had gained its recognition through the women’s right movement and art nouveau,where some critics argue Beardsley first introduced art nouveau in his illustrations for Wilde’s play Salome (Teaching Art Nouveau 5). Reception was generally negatively received as multiple critics argued their distaste in  the Yellow Book as accepting only rejected artwork prototypes ("Bad Art in The Yellow Book" 2) which explained its degeneracy, including its lack of taste, and being painfully grotesque("Rev. of The Yellow Book 13" ). 

            This is significant in understanding The Yellow Book because they actively accepted and sought out pieces of work that contributed to women, in order to express that avant-garde and art nouveau notion of the New Women. For many New Woman writers it was transgressed that The Yellow Book was the place to publish decadent stories as it was a magazine for liberating female writers, a notion that was not so popular at the time (Buzwell 15). Women were often being depicted as esteemed workers, who challenged the ideology that women could do just as much as men. However, with the concept of the New Woman still relatively making its way into headlines, women were still argumentatively categorized based on their career choices, clothing and language. 

Bourke, writer of Working Class Culture in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity, writes through the experiences of Elizabeth, a woman who grew up during this time period expressed that her clothing was far more important and put under scrutiny from her teachers than compared to her scholarship to the high school (50). In this way, a women’s clothing out-weight far more than her education as shown in “The Other Anna” and “Vanity” where both women had to present themselves in a sophisticated way through their clothing. However, The Yellow Book challenges this normative ideal of the class based women and in their illustrations and narratives, presents them as experimental figures who did not have to abide to the rules of society if they so wished.