The aesthetic conception in the artistic and literary work of Althea Gyles (1868–1949)

This article theorises Althea Gyles’s artistic and literary production as a coherent symbolic system shaped by fin-de-siècle Symbolism, Aestheticism, and esoteric discourse. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of her illustrations, poetry, and book designs—read alongside her relationships with W. B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde—the study argues that Gyles articulates a hybrid aesthetic in which text and image operate as a single semiotic field. By situating her work within the Celtic Revival and occult modernity, the article challenges her marginalisation and repositions Gyles as a structurally significant figure in late nineteenth-century culture. The study contributes to a reassessment of fin-de-siècle culture as a relational and generative aesthetic field rather than a narrative of decline by foregrounding collaboration, material book culture, and symbolic intermediality.