“From the Queer and Yellow Book I.–1894 (By Max Mereboom),” in Punch, or the London Charivari, 5 February 1895

[Ada Leverson]

“From the Queer and Yellow Book I.–1894 (By Max Mereboom),” in Punch, or the London Charivari, 5 February 1895

If Beardsley had an “opposite number” among women contemporaries, it was the novelist Ada Leverson (1862–1933). Like him, she was gifted, mischievous, and incapable of passing up a chance to satirize her contemporaries, even (or especially) her dearest friends. Posterity remembers her extraordinary kindness to Oscar Wilde, whom she sheltered in her house, both when he was in the middle of the trials that led to his conviction and sentence of two years at hard labor and immediately after his release from prison. But before those grim events, she engaged repeatedly in mockery of Wilde and other decadents, as in this Punch parody of Max Beerbohm’s faux-nostalgic way of treating the present as long past. Beardsley was among her good friends, but his art for the Yellow Book and his ungainly, androgynous appearance were butts of vicious jokes in the accompanying visual lampoon by E. T. (Edward Tennyson) Reed.

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press