Description:
A scholarly edition of Beardsley's unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill, with a selection of his other writing.
Review Quotes:
'Sections of [Under the Hill] appeared, heavily edited, in The Savoy during Beardsley's life, and it has been reissued several times since in varying degrees of expurgation. But it has never received the lavish scholarly attention that Sasha Dovzhyk and Simon Wilson bestow in Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley' - Colton Valentine, New Yorker, 13 February 2023
'Sasha Dovzhyk and Simon Wilson's edition of Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley, Volume 10 of the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise series, offers a thorough and judicious introduction to a figure whose influence as an artist is uncontested while making a compelling case for reconsidering Beardsley's significance as a writer. [...] Their scrupulously scholarly edition strikes a deft balance between providing a rich resource for Beardsley scholars and making Under the Hill accessible to general readers. They provide able guidance to Beardsley's densely allusive world, painstakingly tracking down and teasing apart the thicket of references threaded throughout Beardsley's prose. [...] One of the pleasures of the edition is the clear personal investments of the editors; this is clearly a labour of love and their admiration for their subject is - in a metaphor Beardsley himself would relish - contagious.' - Nicole Fluhr, The Wildean, 64 (2024), pp. 206-09
'The appearance of this volume is a notable event in the history of publishing, of nineteenth-century erotica, of the fine arts and of the cosmopolitan spirit of the fin de siècle... an elegant, allusive work of scholarship freighted with the learned references that the art of Aubrey Beardsley demands and deserves.' - John Stokes, Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, 8, 2023, pp. 121-25