'No one who looks with a psychological eye at Beardsley's drawings could doubt that his mother's was the major presence in his imaginative life. The drawings owe their erotic force to the fact that, thanks to her continuing in the central place in his mental world, he was able to keep intact the fierce son-to-mother eroticism of childhood.'Twenty-five years was the brief span of Aubrey Beardsley's life: tuberculosis claimed him in 1898. But his work has endured - indeed it has come to define our vision of the fin de siecle 1890s; and it retains its power to seduce, to provoke, and to shock.Brigid Brophy had already authored one appreciation of Beardsley (Black and White, 1968) when the accumulation of new biographical detail about the artist, his family and his short, brilliant life encouraged her to essay a second, published in 1978. Original, cogent, economic in its argument and finally most affecting, this book benefits by Brophy's 'psychological eye' and draws the sharpest possible portrait - with a clarity of prose akin to its subject's fineness of line - of Aubrey Beardsley and his times.