Under the Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse

About this book

A young poet wanders into the realm of Venus, where pleasure and elaborate beauty become a test of his innocence. The language delights in excess, but the promise of enchantment is never entirely trustworthy.

Aubrey Beardsley's unfinished prose fantasy Under the Hill anchors this collection of his writing, accompanied by the distinctive imagination that made him famous as a draughtsman. Its decadent humour and elaborate surfaces belong to the artistic culture of the 1890s. The pleasure is in the sentences as much as in the visions they describe.