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THE CONFESSIONS OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY

Donald S. Olson

In a stunning fictional tour de force, based on five years of research, Donald S. Olson portrays Aubrey Beardsley's life from infancy to his death at the early age of twenty-five, a victim of tuberculosis.

Written in the first person, in the form of confessional letters to a French priest, Père Coubé, The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley weaves fictional incidents into the biographical facts of Beardsley's life to present a powerful portrait of a modern artist.

Aubrey Beardsley challenged the hypocrisies of Victorian England — and was made to suffer for it.

THE CONFESSIONS OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY brilliantly captures the atmosphere of intense creative upheaval, decadence and despair which infused fin-de-siècle artistic and literary life. It is the richly-imagined story of a man who was impassioned by art and consumed by life.

(Originally published in 1993)
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Published 2020-03-01 by Lume Books

Comments

"Margaret Foster did it, Peter Ackroyd did it. Now Donald S. Olson has done it. The author become s the medium through with a dead genius has his final word... The triumph of his book is that Beardsley himself. with his jaunty courage, his acerbic wit, and his amazingly precocious genius, retains one's sympathy from beginning to end."

"Bitter, humorous and sly, the confessions beguile and shock the reader by turns."

" with The Confessions of Aubrey Beardsley the imagined voice Olson creates for Beardsley's rarified aestheticism is spot on, particularly in his battles with the censorious “If my persecutors regarded me as some kind of erotomaniac, then I wanted to give them something to be frightened about.”

"A lively account of the life of a brilliant misfit."