Winner of the 2018 European Society for the Study of English Book Prize for Literature in the English Language

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• A rare and fascinating account of scent and perfume availability and use in the Victorian period
• The first book to explore nineteenth-century literature via perfume and the sense of smell
• Canvasses a large range of British nineteenth-century poetry and prose and some early twentieth-century writers, and includes imaginative readings of both canonical and non-canonical literary texts
• Includes a diverse and intriguing range of images including colour plates
• Draws on a wealth of material including perfumer guides, etiquette guides, beauty manuals, advertising, diaries, letters, and biographies
• Also studies flowers and buttonholes, soap and toiletries, aromatic jewellery, the scenting of garments and letters, and perfumed snuff and tobacco

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This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors,?Scents and Sensibility?introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the little-known cultural history of perfume use and the appreciation of natural fragrance in Victorian Britain. It shows how scent and perfume are used to convey not merely moods and atmospheres but the nuances of the aesthete or decadent's carefully cultivated identity, personality, or sensibility.?

A key theme is the emergence of the?olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.