SOURCE: Baldick, Chris. “Secular Variations.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4718 (3 September 1993): 20-1.

In the following excerpt, Baldick praises Showalter's exploration of the fin-de-siècle in Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle.

Like the widow in Wilde's play whose hair has turned gold with grief, the study of the last century's Nineties sports an unseemly glow of prosperity. Nothing flourishes quite like decadence, and productivity is booming in the languor industry. The shiny new conference centre at Warwick University accommodates symposia on world-weariness, while publishers look forward to issuing fresh volumes on cultural exhaustion. The calendar has, of course, something to do with it, but unlike the Nineties of Mary Wollstonecraft or of Christopher Marlowe, no less deserving of resurrection by rote, the Yellow Nineties or Naughty Nineties seem to address us with the additional sinister allure of the hypochondriac, superstitiously mesmerized by his self-assigned curse of...