The Symbolist aesthetic in late nineteenth-century Europe demonstrates a particularly idiosyncratic complexity due to its interweaving of cultural, political, social, scientific, and aesthetic influences. Tracking these individual strands in the art and literature at the fin-de-siècle reveals a strong reaction against Enlightenment ideals of progress and rationalism that was often expressed in visual and verbal images of superstition and mysticism. During this period, subjective intuition replaced realist observation while suggestion was preferred to description for aesthetic effect. Compared to studies on Realism and Impressionism, those dedicated to Symbolism sometimes appear as slender and evasive as the effetely emaciated figures that frequently populate the visual and literary output of the practitioners of the movement. Benedict Nicholson once termed Symbolist art as “the other,” describing it as “the seamy side of the nineteenth century, a melancholy art of yearning for unattainable ideals” [Benedict Nicholson, “Sacred and Profane in Turin,” Burlington Magazine (October 1962): 641]. Patricia Mathews’s Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art tackles this problem of “the other” in its many-sided relationships between subject and style, gender and genre. She provides a convincing and insightful analysis of the Symbolist generation’s attitudes to the nature and gender of artistic identity, thereby...