Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction by Kate Holterhoff

Abstract

Reviewed by: Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction by Kate Holterhoff Catherine J. Golden (bio) Kate Holterhoff, Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. xi + 198, $150 hardcover. In her study of illustration of inexpressible wonders accompanying fin de siècle romance fiction, Kate Holterhoff skillfully delves into the fiction of five transatlantic authors. These "popular romance fictions [that] facilitated how audiences experienced indescribable times, senses, desires, technologies, and feelings" appeared serially in leading periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the Strand Magazine, the Graphic, Pearson's Magazine, Harper's Weekly, and Cosmopolitan (12). To Holterhoff, romance is "a catchall to describe non-realistic fictions in a range of genres including historical romance, children's fiction, adventure fiction, scientific romance, and the gothic" (3). Readers will travel the high seas on Robert Louis Stevenson's adventures, meet Rudyard Kipling's talking beasts, journey into "Darkest Africa" through Rider Haggard's imperial romances, encounter H. G. Wells's futuristic machines, and confront James De Mille's civilized cannibals (1). Whether visualizing an unreachable past, fanciful speaking animals, or technologies far beyond the nineteenth century, illustrators of fin de siècle romance fiction (from 1885 to 1920) have a shared mission to depict what authors often left opaque by giving material form to "wonders thought to surpass or somehow thwart human description"—the leitmotif of this book (17). Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction has an introduction and five body chapters, each on one major author. The introduction defines the Symbolist movement (which informed fin de siècle illustrators), word and image studies, developments in nineteenth-century illustration, and the field of illustration studies, and it also includes chapter summaries. Holterhoff aptly places her work in the context of pioneering collector-critics Gleeson White and Forrest Reid (who published from 1897 to 1927) as well as current illustration studies scholars, including Simon Cooke, Paul Goldman, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Lisa Surridge, Andrea Korda, Julia Thomas, and Catherine Golden. This ambitious introductory chapter begins with an engaging comparison of E. K. Johnson's and Charles Kerr's illustrations of narrator Horace Holley gazing on a dismembered, mummified foot of a once beautiful woman in Haggard's She (1887). Here Holterhoff demonstrates her skill as a reader of illustration and her background as an artist. Indeed, she opens each of the five chapters with a compelling reading of illustration and excels in comparative analysis of illustrators across nation and time. Chapter 1, "Picturing the Past in Robert Louis Stevenson's Historical Romances," presents leading artists, such as George Roux, Walter Paget, and N. C. Wyeth, who relied upon antiquities and reference books to visualize [End Page 462] Stevenson's narratives of bygone eras replete with pirates and historical personages. The second chapter, "From Visual Irony to Caricature," moves readers to a different marvel: animals gifted with speech (although humans can only understand the language of domesticated animals). Comparative readings of illustrations by, for example, Oliver Herford, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph M. Gleeson demonstrate ways talking animals appear believable and entertaining. Chapter 3, "Desiring African Women in H. Rider Haggard's Adventure Fiction," offers a sensitive reading of illustrations of scantily clad native women whose charms defy description and captivated Haggard and his white male readers. This topic, racially charged today, could be politically incorrect in less judicious hands than Holterhoff's. Her analysis of Haggard's illustrators, including Maurice Greiffenhagen (who drew the arresting portrait on the cover) and Edmund Frederick, reveals her expertise as the originator of Visual Haggard (http://www.visualhaggard.org). The fourth chapter, "Picturing Machines in H. G. Wells's Scientific Romances," presents eminent illustrators, such as Warwick Goble and Alvin Corrêa, who envisioned Wells's wondrous technologies in an apocalyptic future. Chapter 5, "A Cannibal Vision," focuses on illustrators, including True Williams and Gilbert Gaul, of De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), an imperial Gothic romance that confronts the "paradoxically unimaginable and yet profoundly embodied horror" of cannibalism (162). Holterhoff provocatively argues that in showing white and non-white cannibals, De Mille's illustrated romance...