Under the Hill, and Other Essays in Prose and Verse

Aubrey Beardsley died at twenty-five, but he lived as if each day were his last, and this book proves it. Published six years after his death from tuberculosis, Under the Hill collects his final prose, verse, and illustrations into a portrait of an artist who refused every constraint: moral, aesthetic, or mortal. The centerpiece, the unfinished novel "Under the Hill," follows the Abbé Fanfreluche through a dreamlike landscape of excess and artifice, where beauty and grotesquerie collide. Helen and her lavishly adorned entourage move through scenes of pure sensory delirium. It's Dante rewritten by a libertine, with illustrations that scandalized Victorian England and still startle today. Also included are Beardsley's letters and poems, which reveal the mind behind the myth: brilliant, witty, and haunted by the knowledge that his body was failing even as his art reached its furious peak. For readers who want art that refuses to comfort, that glories in its own artificiality while staring down death.