An essay published in Cosmopolis in 1898 greets D’Annunzio's arrival into world literature with a feeling of ambivalence. The English critic Virginia M. Crawford hailed the Italian writer as ‘the founder of a new school in the history of Italian literature’ and compared him to Maeterlinck as ‘the precocious geniuses of the age’. But she also noted the hypersensuality, autobiographical obsession, cynicism and sexism of his novels – bound to cause ‘a sense of actual nausea’ in many readers. Writing for a multilingual periodical that promoted exchange between European cultures, Crawford gave a detached assessment of D’Annunzio's international success from an English point of view. At the time only two of D’Annunzio's novels had been published in England: Trionfo della morte and Il Piacere – the latter just that year. Crawford knew the English reception lagged behind the French, spearheaded by Melchior de Vogüé's critical patronage and Georges Hérelle's extensive translation activity. And she was aware the tastes and moral codes of the English public made it necessary that English translations be even more heavily expurgated than the French ones. Yet, for this very reason, she was keen to emphasise the challenging intellectual content of his work: his psychological complexity, stylistic power, engagement with music and musical aesthetics and Symbolism – the latter showing that ‘[i]n his literary studies d’Annunzio has clearly included the Belgian school’. Crawford was caught between the desire to make D’Annunzio known to English-speaking readers in his full complexity and the need to warn them about elements that made his work ethically untranslatable: it is as if his worlding should necessarily be accompanied by acts of censorship and concealment.

In the years following Crawford's article, the poet and critic Arthur Symons produced in quick succession three English translations of D’Annunzio's dramas – The Dead City (1900), La Gioconda (1901) and Francesca da Rimini (1902) – supplemented by numerous critical interventions scattered across books and periodicals. Symons was drawn to the highly literary D’Annunzio that attracted Crawford; but, unlike her and most English critics at the time, he championed an unexpurgated D’Annunzio, refusing the tension between artistic and Decadent elements in his works. Symons was closely associated with Decadence and cosmopolitanism after publishing controversial collections of urban poetry in the early 1890s.