The Savoy : Nineties Experiment

When the famous Yellow Book fired its brilliant young art director, Aubrey Beardsley, it provided the impetus for the creation of a Beardsley-centered quarterly to compete with it, The Savoy.

Managed by the unlikely triumvirate of a dying artistic genius (Beardsley, the art editor), a dedicated literary jack-of-all-genres (Arthur Symons, the literary editor), and a pasty-faced pornographer (Leonard Smithers, the publisher), The Savoy's life was stormy and short.

Yet during its eight-issue span it published a remarkable collection of writings and drawings including the Rabelaisian and rococo novel-fragment Under the Hill, Bernard Shaw's greatest essay, "On Going to Church," and other stories, poems, and essays by W.B.

Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson, John ("Dorian") Gray, Ford Madox Ford, Havelock Ellis, Edmund Gosse, "Fiona MacLeod," Arthur Symons, Hubert Crackanthorpe, and others. The Savoy was also a showcase for the brightest artistic talents of the day Rothenstein, Conder, Pennell, Beardsley, Beerbohm and their contemporaries.

As with the literature, the best of The Savoy's art is reproduced in this striking, Savoy-sized volume, prefaced by a lucid, witty introduction by Stanley Weintraub which is, in effect, a "biography" of The Savoy and its fascinating leading figures."