This is a volume to be welcomed. For the first time, proper recognition is given here to the wonderfully rich and varied contribution made by women to the poetry of the 1890s. In fact, rather more space seems to be accorded to poets like Michael Field, Amy Levy, Rosamund Watson, Mary Robinson, and Alice Meynell than to most of the male poets of the period. This reflects on the excellence of the scholarship that has been directed toward recovering the work of these poets over the past couple of decades and should act as a real encouragement for further research, both into the work of these and other women poets and of more of the lesser-known male poets as well. As several contributors point out, women poets were by no means so neglected in their own day as they were during the bulk of the twentieth century. Bristow argues in his highly informative introduction that literary discussion about the period has for too long focused on a series of predictable positions, largely in negative terms, and his project here is revisionist. The book itself is nicely produced and with an informative layout that helps to yoke together rather an uneven group of essays. As one would expect from Bristow, an acknowledged expert in the field, the substantial introduction is both challenging and scholarly. Of particular interest is the section on the influence of changing practices in book production, often through so-called vanity presses that produced highly polished aesthetic artifacts (and here I might also mention the masterly essay by Nicholas Frankel on the books of the Rhymers’ Club). Other informative sections on poets and poetics of the period fill out what for many readers has remained a shadowy or at least sketchy field of inquiry. For example, Bristow clarifies the contribution to 1890s poetics of figures like Wilde's friend John Gray who, like so many of his peers, made a later conversion to Rome, turning his back on aestheticism, but not before causing a great stir with his poetry volume Silverpoints (1893). Bristow also examines the influential role of iconoclasts like Max Beerbohm and, more unexpectedly perhaps, but equally illuminatingly, Ezra Pound.

There is also in this volume a welcome emphasis on poetic form. The introduction points out that “much of the poetry from this period reveals a fascination with fixed forms—like the ballade, which derived from fourteenth-century Old French.” (12). Or the villanelle perhaps—much favored by Ernest Dowson (of “Non sum qualis” fame: I found myself wishing that it had appeared in the chronology of poems, particularly since at least one contributor refers to Dowson as the quintessential '90s poet). And of course, Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist composes a villanelle in what has been taken to be an ironic hit at an instantly recognizable “marker” of the aesthetic movement. Following Pater, form was naturally of central importance in poetic practice.

Yopie Prins continues her recent learned engagement with formal practices in a remarkable essay on Coventry Patmore and Alice Meynell, while other outstanding contributions for me included Marion Thain's essay on Michael Field, where she draws in the influence of John Gray to investigate the poetic ramifications of conversion, and Linda Hughes's further fascinating exploration of Rosamund Watson's work in the context of the print culture of the era.

Some inclusions require a certain elasticity in the 1890s—even if we allow the argument put forward by Jerusha McCormack, in the first (and delightfully forthright) essay in the collection, that the 1890s and the 1890s poet were not necessarily identical. James Thomson died in 1882, Toru Dutt in 1877, Margaret Veley in 1887, and even Amy Levy died before the 1890s began. I am not sure that I would have looked in a collection of this title for these poets—yet who would quibble against the riches on offer after the event! Bristow argues strongly for a revaluation of the fin de siècle period and the intrinsic interest of its poetic productions, in view of what he frequently refers to as the negative evaluations put forward by earlier detractors. I found myself a little puzzled that such an argument needed to be mounted: surely there has been a great revival of interest in the art and literature of the period, including its poetry, during and since the last decade of the twentieth century. The detractors seem to have been outlived. Recent interest has no doubt been boosted by the rise of queer theory, and certainly by increasingly sophisticated cultural studies of sexology, in the period, including distinguished contributions by Bristow himself. In a sense, Bristow acknowledges this when he pays homage to the groundbreaking influence of both feminism and gay and lesbian studies in altering previously held views of the period. Bristow cites Arthur Symons's definition of the decadent in poetry: “A spiritual and moral perversity” (11). And what is wrong with that, pray?

I do hope that it is not the current moral climate in America that is behind the anxiety about such formulations of the enduring appeal of the 1890s. The fin de siècle is not a period entirely separable from the Victorians—it is still deeply engaged with Victorianism, just as modernism was—and it wants to act perversely in light of perceived Victorian values. Bristow takes issue with David Perkins's position here, claiming that Perkins was unfair in viewing the avant-garde poets of the '90s as somehow surrendering an argument to the Victorians, where Bristow prefers to see their engagement with their predecessors as taking the form of a “spirited rebellion” (37)—a view I concur with. But I would have wished him to emphasize more strongly that the essence of this rebellion against certain rigid moral values was bound up inextricably with a profound sexual rebellion. “After Foucault, it has come to be widely accepted that `sexuality' as we know it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, when in 1897 Havelock Ellis declared sex to be `the central problem of life', he was focusing and confirming a vast general tendency in European and North American thinking of the time,” to quote from the prefatory notes to an international conference held in 2005 on “Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle.” This conference was sponsored by the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland—perhaps Brisbane, Australia, is far enough from the epicenter of the “moral majority” in today's Western world?

In fact, the fin de siècle as a period still invites endless resources for fascinating discussions, and the intersection of aesthetics with ethics in the writings of the '90s is one rich source inviting further research. Another is a theme more constantly touched upon in this collection—the shifting role of biography and its intersections with textual productions of the poetry. The included illustrations are generally excellent, especially the striking portraits of Mary Robinson in Ana Parejo Vadillo's fine chapter. Useful chronologies are provided at the beginning of the volume of both poets and poems—but please note that Dora Sigerson Shorter (another neglected figure who deserves further study) was not 102 when she died; she was born in 1866 not 1816! As a whole, this collection most usefully brings together a goodly number of quality essays with an impressive range and depth of scholarship and certainly gives a new vigor to our ideas of the fin de siècle—one hears afresh the low hum of lively chatter between men and women poets.