Nets for the Wind

by Una Taylor

A volume of the Keynotes Series which featured Aubrey Beardsley's cover designs and embellishments. Others in the series include acclaimed titles by authors M.P. Shiel, Grant Allen, Arthur Machen... Taylor's "intentionally phantasmagoric" tales in Nets for the Wind are emblematic of the Keystones Series' experimental, often radical, stylistic leanings.

Excerpt: ...she saw his figure, she listened to his songs which jeered, to his laughter which stung; and his jests and his mockings had the poison of venomous snakes. At length the last night of the Christmas feast had come--the last night of her sojourn in the city. That night for one moment he stood beside her where in a gay crowd the King's masquers mingled with the guests in the palace banqueting-hall. 'Where is your faith now, little heart?' he murmured scoffingly in her ear. Her eyes with their dim shadowed blueness sought his. They answered him--those eyes which mourned, pleaded, believed, and worshipped. And, as once before, reading their creed in that starlit chamber, the words of half-uttered unbelief died upon his lips. 'You have lost your way in truth, you little white soul, ' he said. 'What have you to do with me?' Before she could speak he had left her, and was lost to her view amongst the moving crowd of men and women around. When again she saw him, he was standing in the centre of a group of reckless companions who echoed his gibes with laughter, and applauded his jeers with noisy merriment. She heard, and her heart sickened. Each word seemed to her as a blasphemy of life, the slander of humanity which is outrage to God. The past itself, her very memories, grew tainted and confused as she listened. Could it be possible, could it be, that her hands had ever rested in his hands secure of shelter and cherishing? Could it be that for her his lips had ever supplanted sacrilege with reverence? Had she ever been anything to his life, or was that brief remembered hour but the dream of a dream, was she no more to him than the shadow of a phantom on a twilight wall? The doubt was a torture--an overmastering craving possessed her to hold some..

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1896

About the author

Una Ashworth Taylor was born in 1857 in London, the middle daughter of Sir Henry Taylor (1800–1886) and Theodosia Alice Spring-Rice (d. 1891), herself the daughter of Lord Monteagle. Her father was a poet, author of Philip Van Arteveide (1834), and civil servant in the colonial department. The household was "pre-eminently a happy one" and the host of dozens of literary and artistic celebrities including Julia Cameron, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dodgson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and G. F. Watts (who painted her mother). She wrote seven novels beginning with Wayfarers (1886) and other miscellaneous works. Her two older sisters, Eleanor Ashworth Towle and Ida Ashworth Taylor, also wrote novels. For thirty years she shared a small house in Montpelier Square with her unmarried sister Ida where the sisters "received their many friends and conducted a literary salon, of which the characteristic notes were intellectual interest and Irish warmheartedness." She never married and died in 1922 in Brighton. Her obituary recalled "a lady of high accomplishment, as well as of rare social charm and independence of character" and "a learned and enthusiastic musician, while among art-embroiderers she had probably few, if any, equals in the country."

Reviews

[Osiris Oliphant]

from a contemporary review-

...the author of these short sketches has used a dangerously suggestive title, or at least it will be so to one who reads her stories and honestly answers the query, ‘What do nets set for the wind catch?'
..…the larger number of the tales are utterly without significance. the remaining ones are so weighted down with indefinable longings- “soarings after the ineffable and divings after the unfathomable,” -that the reader, on laying down the book, will sigh for a healthy Jack and Jill romance, in which the woes of the hero and heroine are definite and tangible enough to come within the scope of the ordinary reader’s comprehension.
…the author may have intended to catch nothing but those evasive and shifting moods of lovers which correspond to the physical winds and mists that rise out of the great Ewigkeit, whose boundaries no man knoweth… if such was the author’s purpose, she has succeeded admirably.

[olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved the twisted narrative within all of the stories. What initally sounded like a medieval tale usually became something darker- reminiscient of Wilde's short story collection. Probably one of my favourite Victorian writers yet.