During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, based on original research, Jad Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favoured men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease and unwanted pregnancy.