SOURCE: “The Mythic Svengali: Anti-Aestheticism in Trilby,” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 28, No. 4, Winter, 1996, pp. 525-42.

In the following essay, Grossman examines anti-aestheticism in Trilby, including comparisons with Oscar Wilde's work and a discussion of bohemia and homosexuality in the novel.

Writing about George Du Maurier in 1897, Henry James finds a “mystery” posed by the enormous public success of Du Maurier's Trilby (1894): “The case remains, … it is one of the most curious of our time.” “Why did the public pounce on its prey with a spring so much more than elephantine?” James asks, pondering both the novel and the author it turned into an unwilling celebrity.¹ Certainly shifting marketing practices of both books and authors at the end of the century enabled Trilby's popularity, as Edward Purcell suggests.² However, the answer to James's question lies in how Trilby uniquely fits into a cultural history of the 1890s...