Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget (1856 – 1935). She is now known mostly for her supernatural fiction; she wrote also essays and poetry; she contributed to The Yellow Book. She was a follower of Walter Pater.
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Biography
She was born at Château St Leonard, Boulogne, France. She was the half-sister of Eugene Lee-Hamilton, adapting her pseudonym from his surname; her mother was widowed in 1852, and her father was Eugene's tutor.
She spent time in London, and later resided on the hillside just outside of Florence, in the Palmerino villa, from 1889 until her death in 1935, with a brief interruption during the war. Her library was left to the British Institute of Florence and can still be inspected by visitors. In Florence she knit a lasting friendship with the painter Telemaco Signorini and the learned Mario Praz, who at that time was very young; she encouraged his love of learning and of English literature.
She played the harpsichord very well, and her appreciation of ancient music fills her major work, "Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy"; this book was widely influential. In the 1907 preface to the Studies, she recalls one anecdote about her love of music: when she was a little girl, her mother came across a bundle of sheets of eighteenth-century music; among them, some airs of the Saxon, Hasse. While her mother sat at the piano trying to decipher those old keys, she was so nervous that she had to escape to the garden: she feared lest the famous Hasse failed her expectactions. The first notes of the air (Pallido il Sole, one of the legendary airs sung by Farinelli) reached her through the open window, and filled her with enchantment.
An engaged feminist, she always dressed á la garçonne, and was a member of the Union of democratic control[1].
Her literary works explored the themes of haunting and possession. The English writer and translator, Montague Summers described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction."[2]
She was responsible for introducing the concept of empathy (Einfühling) into the English language. Empathy was a key concept in Lee's psychological aesthetics which she developed on the basis of prior work by Theodor Lipps. Her response to aesthetics interpreted art as a mental and corporeal experience. This was a significant contribution to the philosophy of art which has been largely neglected.
"The Lie of the Land", in the voume "Limbo, and other Essays", has been one of the most influential essays on landscaping.
Additionally she wrote, along with her friend and colleague Henry James, critically about the relationship between the writer and his/her audience pioneering the concept of criticism and expanding the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's (or her personal) response. She was a strong, though vexed, proponent of the Aesthetic movement, and after a lengthy written correspondence met the movement's effective leader, Walter Pater, in England in 1881, just after encountering his famous disciple Oscar Wilde. Her interpretation of the movement called for social action, setting her apart from both Wilde and Pater.
Works
- Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880)
- Ottilie: An Eighteenth Century Idyl (1883)
- The Prince of the Hundred Soups: A Puppet Show in Narrative (1883)
- Belcaro, Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (1883)
- The Countess of Albany (1884)
- Miss Brown (1884) novel
- Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance (1884)
- Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (1886)
- A Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story (1886) novella, also Oke of Okehurst, Alice Oke
- Juvenilia, Being a second series of essays on sundry aesthetical questions (1887)
- Hauntings. Fantastic Stories (1890)
- Vanitas: Polite Stories (1892)
- Althea: Dialogues on Aspirations & Duties (1894)
- Renaissance Fancies And Studies Being A Sequel To Euphorion (1895)
- Art and Life (1896)
- Limbo and Other Essays (1897)
- Genius Loci (1899) travel
- The Child In The Vatican (1900)
- In Umbria: A Study of Artistic Personality (1901)
- Chapelmaster Kreisler A Study of Musical Romanticists (1901)
- Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century (1903)
- The Legend of Madame Krasinska (1903)
- Ariadne in Mantua: a Romance in Five Acts (1903)
- Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of life (1904)
- Pope Jacynth - And Other Fantastic Tales (1904)
- The Enchanted Woods (1905) essays
- The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (1906)
- Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child, an eighteenth-century legend (1906)
- The Spirit of Rome (1906)
- Ravenna and Her Ghosts (1907)
- The Sentimental Traveller . Notes on Places (1908)
- Gospels of Anarchy & Other Contemporary Studies (1908)
- Laurus Nobili: Chapters on Art and Life (1909)
- In Praise of Old Gardens (1912) with others
- Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent Obscurantism ( 1912).
- The Beautiful. An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (1913)
- The Tower of the Mirrors and Other Essays on the Spirit of Places (1914)
- Louis Norbert. A Twofold Romance (1914) novel
- The Ballet of the Nations. A Present-Day Morality (1915) illustrations by Maxfield Armfield
- Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (1920)
- Proteus or The Future Of Intelligence (1925)
- The Golden Keys (1925) essays
- The Poet's Eye (Hogarth Press, 1926)
- For Maurice. Five Unlikely Stories (1927)
- Music and its Lovers (1932)
- Snake Lady and Other Stories (1954)
- Supernatural Tales (1955)
- The Virgin of the Seven Daggers - And Other Chilling Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1962)
Notes
References
- Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935 (1964) Peter Gunn
- The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian style): a psychological and critical study of "Vernon Lee" (1987) Burdett Gardner
- Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (2003) Vineta Colby
- Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II. Routledge; London. 2002. ISBN 0-415-15983-0.
External links
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