Amid the bold and heady novelties of the burgeoning modernist movement in literature at the turn of the century, it was easy enough to overlook the work of Ethel Colburn Mayne, a writer known more for the "delicacy and restraint" and "psychological subtlety" of her style than for audacious innovations in form or content. Though then frequently compared with Henry James and Katherine Mansfield--Mayne too specialized in the short story--Mayne's often enigmatic and "elliptical" fiction did not win her a wide audience, and her readership has long since disappeared along with her work. Yet Mayne's writing is nonetheless important for exemplifying a distinct tradition grounded in the "Yellow Book School" of the 1890s and for giving voice to some of its fullest expression over a period of nearly half a century. Named after The Yellow Book, the most notorious periodical of the 1890s, the school was paid tribute...