BEARDSLEY, 'Audrey' [i.e. Aubrey BEARDSLEY]. Venus and Tannhauser.

BEARDSLEY, 'Audrey' [i.e. Aubrey BEARDSLEY]. Venus and Tannhauser. S.l.: Privatly [sic] printed.[c. 1920].

8vo. Publisher’s red cloth, upper board lettered in gilt within gilt border, top-edge stained red, fore-edge uncut; pp. [48], with 6 full-page decorative borders by Beardsley; joints and spine ends lightly rubbed; light thumb-mark to title; a very good copy.

No. 84 of 500 copies of this privately printed edition of Beardsley’s unfinished erotic novel, the author listed as ‘Audrey Beardsley’; the unexpurgated manuscript was first published in full in 1907 for private circulation by Leonard Smithers.

Beardsley’s Venus and Tannhauser - the first three chapters of which appeared 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. Beardsley’s erotic treatment of the legend remained unfinished, likely due to his conversion to Catholicism in 1897 and 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 to ‘destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings … By all that is holy - all obscene drawings’.

OCLC finds six copies in the US (Berkeley, Chicago, Colorado College, Harry Ransom, Kinsey Institute, Princeton) and none in the UK; not on Library Hub.

Samuels Lasner 151e. See Harpham, ‘The Incompleteness of Beardsley's Venus and Tannhäuser’, in English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 18.1 (1975), pp. 24-32.

SKU: 2125402