Green Book Issue 17

“Let the curtains rise on Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Harlot’s House’, first published
in The Dramatic Review (11 April 1885), which publisher Leonard Smither’s
notes is ‘not included in the edition of his collected Poems’—I assume a reference
to the volume issued by Elkin Mathews and John Lane in 1892. While ‘The
Harlot’s House’ has since become available, we would like to present it here as
Leonard Smithers had in a portfolio edition in 1904: with five ‘weirdly powerful
and beautiful’ drawings by Althea Gyles, known for her lavish cover designs for
Yeats’s poetry collections, including The Secret Rose (1897), two covers for The
Wind Among the Reeds (1899/1990), and Poems (1900). We will explore more
fully this remarkable artist in a future issue of The Green Book.”