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Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
Netta (née Janet) Syrett's fiction from the 1890s, as well as later works set in the Victorian period, often feature young women rebelling against rigidly conservative families. Syrett came, however, from an unusually progressive background. She was born in Landsgate, Kent, to a family in which everyone (four girls and a boy) was encouraged to pursue educational and artistic ambitions. After attending the Training College for Women Teachers at Cambridge, she took a position at the London Polytechnic School for Girls and lived in London with her sisters, without a chaperone. Thanks to friendships with the Beardsley family and with Aline (1860-1939) and Henry Harland (1861-1905)—as well as a distant relationship by marriage with the novelist Grant Allen—Syrett (1848-1899) became a member of the Yellow Book “set” before the magazine even existed.
Between 1894 and 1897, Syrett contributed three short stories to the Bodley
Head’s quarterly and eventually brought in her sisters Mabel and Nellie Syrett as visual artists to
supply images and cover art towards the end of the magazine’s run. Perhaps more
important, however, was the record she left of the
Of all the
Only in “Thy Heart’s Desire” (volume 2), the first of her
The protagonist of “Thy Heart’s Desire,” a woman who has married someone she
cannot love, is too ethical to consider having an affair, even after meeting a
man who appears to be her intellectual and spiritual soul-mate. At the same
time, she cannot keep herself from wishing her husband dead. Sensing that this
is the “Heart’s Desire” of the woman he adores, her husband finds a way to kill
himself that will neither look like suicide nor result in blame being laid upon
her. Yet not even this act can free her. She remains tormented by the knowledge
that she was morally responsible for her husband’s fate and, therefore, sends
away forever the other man, to suffer on her own. The only thing that spoils
this otherwise haunting story is its cardboard setting—an unconvincing and quite
featureless settlement in rural India, seemingly lifted from Syrett’s reading of
Rudyard Kipling’s
The closer Syrett came not only to feelings but to locations with which she was
familiar, the more memorable her short stories were. With the post-
© 2015, Margaret D.Stez, University of Delaware.
Margaret D. Stetz is Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and
Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her recent essays have
appeared in the volumes