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"I hate too much the horrid aspect and company of the whole publication," wrote Henry James to his brother William on May 28, 1894, a month and a half after his story "The Death of the Lion" appeared in the first issue of The Yellow Book (SL 277). "And yet I am again to be intimately-conspicuously-associated with the second number. It is for gold and to oblige the worshipful Harland." James went on to publish two more stories and an essay in the magazine and even recalled fondly his first meeting and continued association with its editors, Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley, in the preface to the volume of the New York Edition in which he collected all of his Yellow Book stories. In both the letter to William and in the later preface, James appears deeply concerned with his financial security and professional and social standing in the transatlantic literary world at the turn of the twentieth century.
James's motives-earning money and obliging the worshipful-have been the focus of critics who have tried, over the last thirty or so years, to complicate the image of James as an elite artist governed by a devotion to style, serenely unaffected by the demands of the market and the opinions of his peers and readers. The best works in this critical strain have carefully and shrewdly examined James's view of the literary market, the culture of publicity, and the aesthetic movement and have fundamentally changed our perception of James's career choices.1 However, James's involvement with The Yellow Book, which lay at the convergence of these modern forces, has been either treated as a flirtation with aestheticism or subsumed into a general argument about his professional desperation during a period of rejection by established magazines.2 In his erudite and compelling Professions of Taste, Jonathan Freedman argues that through his cautious engagement with aestheticism James asserted himself as "the true exemplar of the disinterested, artistic novelist" (178) but at the same time established himself as a literary professional who recognized the appeal of disinterestedness to an elite readership, a model that so many modernist artists would follow. But while Freedman and others see James's publication in The Yellow Book merely as part of his general professional transformation in the...