BEARDSLEY, Aubrey. The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser … a Romantic Novel. Now First Printed from the Original Manuscript.

Under the Hill, Unexpurgated

BEARDSLEY, Aubrey. The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser … a Romantic Novel. Now First Printed from the Original Manuscript. London: for private circulation [i.e. Leonard Smithers]. 1907.

4to. Publisher’s blue-grey buckram, printed label to upper board; pp. 88, with half-title; slight soiling to label; internally clean and bright; a very good copy, uncut and unopened; old catalogue clipping loosely inserted.

First edition to be published from the original manuscript of Beardsley’s unfinished erotic work, no. 165 of 250 copies on handmade paper from a total edition of 300 copies.

Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhäuser – the first three chapters of which appeared in expurgated form as Under the Hill in the first issue of The Savoy – is inspired by the folkloric German tale of the knight and poet–musician Tannhäuser, who is lured into the Mountain of Venus and spends several years indulging in hedonistic pleasures.

Following the appearance of the first few chapters in The Savoy, in July 1896 ‘Smithers announced that serialization was discontinued, but that [Venus and Tannhäuser] would be published in book form with numerous illustrations as soon as Beardsley was well enough to complete it’ (Letters, quoted in Samuels Lasner). Beardsley’s erotic treatment of the legend remained unfinished, however, likely due to his conversion to Catholicism in 1897 as well as his declining health.

The ‘dominating and consuming sin’ of aestheticism was ‘precisely the offense of which Beardsley came to feel most guilty. After beginning instruction in the Roman Catholic faith, Beardsley had written his spiritual mentor, Andre Raffalovich, that the true Christian man of letters “must sacrifice his gifts, just as Magdalen must sacrifice her beauty”’ (Harpham, p. 25). Shortly before his untimely death of tuberculosis, he ordered Leonard Smithers and his patron, Herbert Charles Pollitt, to destroy his ‘bad drawings […] By all that is holy – all obscene drawings’.

Samuels Lasner 151.

SKU: 2124720