Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends. Penelope Fitzgerald

work, sits in her spotless cap and apron, with her Bible and workbox on her knee, waiting in vain for the expected visit. During the bridal night itself, when for the lovers ‘the present is eternity’, the old woman dies. As a corpse she is still sitting stiffly the next morning in her chair, ‘alone and smiling’. She has remained on duty.

      Charlotte was twenty-five. The Minnow Fishers had not been accepted so far, nor had A Wedding Day. In 1894, in common with most of London’s hopeful writers, she saw the preliminary announcement of yet another magazine, this time a new quarterly. ‘In many ways its contributors will employ a freer hand than the limitations of the old-fashioned periodical can permit. It will publish no serials; but its complete stories will sometimes run to a considerable length in themselves.’ The notice was printed on bright yellow paper, with a bizarre illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. ‘And while The Yellow Book will seek always to preserve a delicate, decorous and reticent mien and conduct, it will at the same time have the courage of its modernness, and not tremble at the frown of Mrs Grundy.’ Although John Lane, the publisher, was every bit as commercially-minded as Newnes, the élitist tone of all this contrasted boldly with The Strand, which had been ‘respectfully placed’ in the hands of the public. The Yellow Book also promised to be important, charming, daring and distinguished, and the editor was prepared to consider contributions.

       CHAPTER FIVE A Yellow Book Woman

      JOHN LANE, who launched The Yellow Book with his partner, Elkin Mathews, was (in Arthur Waugh’s phrase) ‘a sly new-comer’, or, to put it another way, a publisher with a fine instinct for the right moment. In 1893–4 he sensed that the Aesthetes had still a little distance to go, and could contribute to the beautiful book-making which he loved. On the other hand, he could cautiously scent the new movements, women’s independence in particular. He was projecting his Eve’s Library (the title itself is a Lane-like compromise) which was to include a translation of Hansson’s Das Buch der Frauen and studies called The Ascent of Woman and Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. Meanwhile, when Aubrey Beardsley and Henry Harland came to him with their idea for the new quarterly, distinguished in contents and make-up, but bound in lemon-yellow, the colour of dubious French paperbacks, Lane realized that there was something in it for him. With the attention-catching Yellow Book he could trap new authors on to his list and publicize those he had already. ‘Modernness’, yes – no stirring yarns, no serials, no rescue from the railway-line – but Lane wanted Harland, while looking around for new talent and creating an agreeable stir, to keep his head. The down-and-out element on Lane’s list, unfortunates like Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, who was drinking himself to death on eau-de-cologne, all the pale infusion of French symbolism and post-Pre-Raphaelitism, even Aubrey Beardsley himself, could all be got rid of if necessary, and so indeed, before long, they were. Lane was the coming publisher, poised between the old century and the new, and making a profit from both.

      Henry Harland, his editor, was a very different kind of literary man, a garrulous flamboyant New Yorker, unpredictable except in his kindness. Although he wrote a great deal himself, favouring at this particular time a style half way between Maupassant and George du Maurier, his real talent lay in encouraging others. He was a champion of the short story, even a martyr to it, since underneath his party-giving geniality he was already mortally sick with tuberculosis.

      Harland loved his contributors, whenever that was possible, and was loved. He was ‘the Chief’, with a rare editorial temperament, putting all his knowledge of the business at their disposal, and working passionately over their copy. Yet he allowed himself to be laughed at. He could in fact be quite childish, buttoning up his waistcoat over two cushions to appear unnaturally stout, or telling his guests – though always with great charm – that there was nothing to eat in the place and he could only conclude that he must have been drunk when he invited them. But the next step would be to some little French restaurant, where everyone could talk till the stars grew pale. When Aline, his wife, arrived from America, there might be arguments on a heroic scale, and a crockery-throwing element was added to the Harlands’ true commitment to music and literature. The editorial desk was disorderly, and the Chief relied on his assistant, Ella D’Arcy (not really anything as grand as an assistant, she said, all she did was to tidy up the drawers and put the typescripts at the bottom to the top), to meet the printer’s deadline. Before Ella volunteered for the job, however, and while there was still clear space on the desk, Harland and Beardsley brought out the first number of The Yellow Book.

      All who paid their five shillings expected something extraordinary; most were outraged by Arthur Symons’s Stella Maris, written a long way after Rossetti’s Jenny, and glorifying the ‘delicious shame’ of some long past night with a prostitute, or, as he calls her, a ‘Juliet of the Streets’. Symons’s piece yearns back to the faint end-time of the last Romantics, and Beardsley’s Night Piece, which does duty as an illustration, is precisely of the nineties. Ella D’Arcy’s short story Irremediable, however, looks forward to the coming psychological novel. Understated, economical and subtle, the story is one of what she called her ‘monochromes’. The husband no longer loves his intensely irritating wife who can’t even shut the door properly, or ‘do one mortal thing efficiently or well’. But in the end he accepts that she will always be the centre of his life, because hate is stronger than love.

      Charlotte Mew seems not to have written her next story, Passed, until she had read The Yellow Book’s opening number. By this I don’t mean that she was waiting to see what sort of thing would suit, rather that reading it set her imagination free. Passed bears every sign of being written at top speed, projected with not much conscious control from the level which her life as Miss Lotti suppressed. The narrator, who appears to be a well-off young woman, given, however, to ranging the London streets at the mercy of her own ‘warring nature’, suddenly rushes out of her comfortable home on a cold December evening. She enters a Roman Catholic church (which seems to be St James’s, Spanish Place), and in the lamp-lit darkness sees a girl kneeling in ‘unquestionable despair’, a ‘wildly tossed spirit’ who appeals silently for help. ‘Did she reach me, or was our advance mutual? It cannot be told. I suppose we neither know. [sic]’ They hurry together through mean crowded streets to a wretched tenement, where the girl’s sister lies dying; their last possessions, a chair and an inlaid workbox, have been put on the fire. We are to understand that they have come down in the world and the sister has been seduced by a lord, or at least by a clubman, as fragments of a letter on crested paper are lying on the quilt. The fragrance of a bunch of ‘dearly-bought’ violets, in a tea-cup at the bedside, strays through the room.

      Indisputably, I determined, something must be done for the half-frantic wanderer who was pressing a tiring weight against me. And there should be some kind hand to cover the cold limbs and close the wide eyes of the sleeper.… The dark eyes unwillingly open reached mine in an insistent stare. One hand lying out upon the coverlid, I could never again mistake for that of temporarily suspended life. My watch ticked loudly, but I dare not examine it, nor could I wrench my sight from the figure on the bed.…

      My gaze was chained: it could not get free. As the shapes of monsters of every varying and increasing dreadfulness flit through one’s dreams, the images of those I loved crept round me, with stark yet well-known features, their limbs borrowing death’s rigid outline, as they mocked my recognition with soundless semblances of mirth.… The horribly familiar company began to dance at intervals in and out of a ring of white gigantic bedsteads, set on end like tombstones, each of which framed a huge and fearful travesty of the sad set face that was all the while seeking vainly a pitiless stranger’s care.

      In spite of this Poe-like vision, the narrator harshly refuses to stay. Suppressing her own conscience, she escapes (a cab happens to be passing) to her own home and family. Her brother’s friends have arrived, there are lights and dancing, and she waltzes all