The rhythm of decadence and desire, or: leisured reading in Arthur Symons’s ‘Jenny Lane’.

My proposed paper analyses Arthur Symons’ short story “An Episode in the Life of Jenny Lane” as an exploration of leisured reading in the nineteenth century, where the act of reading —particularly for women like Jenny—is situated as a site for discovering sexuality and romantic desire. Drawing from theories of embodied cognition and aestheticism, as advanced by key figures such as Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Jean D’Udine and Marion Thain, I investigate how bodily sensations and interoceptive rhythms shape both the reader’s and character’s engagement with the text. By applying principles of embodied cognition not only to readers of the text but to the reader- characters within it, I suggest that Jenny’s romantic infatuation with the poet Travers emerges through her embodied reading experiences in her leisure time. This perspective frames Travers’s responses to her within the broader context of aestheticism’s quest for new sensations, highlighting the physical and perceptual dimensions of Jenny’s encounters with both literature and desire. In doing so, it delineates a connection between the practice of leisurely reading and the exploration of sexuality.