The Woman with the Fan

A woman whose beauty has always done her thinking for her marries a man who loves what he sees, and is left with a face and nothing behind it. Hichens made his name at thirty with The Green Carnation, an anonymous skit on Wilde published the year before Wilde's trials; he spent the rest of his career writing the fashionable world he had mocked, and this is his coldest look at it. Fifty-two plates of portraits and gatherings by painters from George Frederic Watts to Christopher Wood follow a face that is only ever looked at, never seen.