This paper by Annette Lavers, a pioneering scholar of Beardsley’s literary work, is published here for the first time from the author’s typescript which she shared with Simon Wilson in 1998. This is Part II of the piece.

This paper by Annette Lavers, a pioneering scholar of Beardsley’s literary output, is published here for the first time from the author’s typescript which she shared with Simon Wilson in 1998. This is Part I of the piece.

A new peer-reviewed article on Beardsley-inspired forms of urban Russian masculinity has been published in Modernist Cultures, 16:2 (2021). The early-twentieth-century homophile men were captivated by Beardsley’s image and did their best to emulate it. Can we blame them?

Sasha Dovzhyk writes for the Rimbaud & Verlaine Foundation about Beardsley’s depictions of Bathyllus and the reception of the images by the modernist writer Mikhail Kuzmin in the context of Russian queer histories.

Caroline de Westenholz traces the details of Aubrey Beardsley’s stay in the picturesque town of Menton on the French Riviera, where the artist and writer died on 16 March 1898. This piece was originally published in The Death of Pierrot: A Beardsley Miscellany, ed. by Steven Halliwell and Matthew Sturgis (London, 1898).

The fact that Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson has a gorgeous art-nouveau exhibition waiting to open is owed in part to Beardsley. The museum owns an original Beardsley drawing ‘One of the Spirits’ (1893) which has recently reemerged from the storeroom to be presented to the public for the first time.

The AB Library has received the digitised copy of an indispensable resource for any Beardsley scholar, A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley by Mark Samuels Lasner,

Dr Samuel Shaw writes about friendship and artistic connections between Beardsley and William Rothenstein, discussing specific visual examples as well as the tendency of their images to ‘speak to, but never exactly illustrate, the texts from which they draw’.

In this previously unpublished paper, Simon Wilson clarifies a long-standing confusion regarding the titles of the two drawings of the notorious Roman empress Messalina created by Beardsley in 1895 and 1896. Wilson also establishes the designs’ close correspondence to the text of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire thus busting the myth of the irrelevance of Beardsley’s drawings to the literary works he illustrated.

This article explores one of the many aspects of Aubrey Beardsley’s transnational legacy, focusing on his appropriation by Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936), a key modernist writer and a seminal voice of the emerging homosexual subculture in Russia. While Kuzmin often used Beardsley as a signifier of homoeroticism in his literary works and life-writing, it is in his play Little Grove (1922) that the queering of Beardsley is crystallised. My intermedial analysis of the piece will show how allusions to Beardsley shape Kuzmin’s representation of gender and sexuality and how the formal construction of Kuzmin’s publication echoes the formal features of Beardsley’s graphic designs.

Ruth Smith explores Beardsley’s self-fashioning through his home in Pimlico, London, and the new resonance of the artist’s practices during the 2020 worldwide lockdown. Domestic interiors are often performative extensions of the self, and are perhaps even more so in this time of coronavirus. Like Beardsley’s, our homes have become a space where the personal, the public, and the realms of leisure and work have come to reside.

The image of Aubrey Beardsley has been long enveloped in an aura of notoriety with distinctly erotic overtones. He has been seen as a rebel figure in the era of militant Victorian prudery. Sasha Dovzhyk argues that the myth of Beardsley as a Victorian sexual liberator was forged in 1966 when the V&A dedicated a major exhibition to the artist and displayed his most explicit works for the first time.

Beardsley’s illustrations for J. M. Dent’s edition of the Morte Darthur (1893–4) have often been deemed to bear an unusually tenuous relation to the Arthurian narrative. Out of approximately 500 illustrations, only the 20 full-page illustrations address identifiable moments in the narrative. Despite their supposed inaptness to Malory’s text, Dent and his successors have continued to reuse the illustrations in subsequent editions of the Morte Darthur.

How La Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram (1893) is one of Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Le Morte Darthur, published by JM Dent in 1894. It shows Isoud seated writing at a desk in an interior. Beyond her is a wall with twin windows and underneath these is a pair of identical, or almost identical, floor-standing chests or coffers. In the original drawing, which is extant in a private collection in London, the one on the right has a keyhole, but the other has not.