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Vernon Lee

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"Violet Paget" redirects here. For the actress "Miss Violet Paget", see Hugh Buckler.

Vernon Lee
Portrait of Violet Paget by John Singer Sargent
Portrait of Violet Paget by John Singer Sargent
BornViolet Paget
(1856-10-14)14 October 1856
France
Died13 February 1935(1935-02-13) (aged 78)
OccupationShort-story writer, essayist
NationalityBritish
GenreShort story, supernatural

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget (14 October 1856 – 13 February 1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. She wrote more than forty books and a huge number of journal articles and essays. She also maintained a very extensive correspondence.

Biography

Violet Paget, circa 1870

Vernon Lee was born as Violet Paget in France on 14 October[1] 1856, at Château St Leonard, Boulogne, to British expatriate parents, Henry Ferguson Paget and Matilda Lee-Hamilton (née Abadam). Violet Paget was the half-sister of Eugene Jacob Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907)[2] by her mother's first marriage, and from whose surname she adapted her own pseudonym. Although she primarily wrote for an English readership and made many visits to London, she spent the majority of her life on the continent, particularly in Italy.[3]

Villa il Palmerino, Florence, Italy

Her longest residence was just outside Florence in the Palmerino villa from 1889 until her death at San Gervasio, with a brief interruption during World War I. Her library was left to the British Institute of Florence and can still be inspected by visitors.

Lee had long-term intense relationships with two women, Mary Robinson, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson.[4]

An engaged feminist, she always dressed à la garçonne. During the First World War, Lee adopted strong pacifist views, for example in her work Satan the Waster, which led to her being ostracized by the younger generation of scholars and writers.[5] She was a member of the anti-militarist organisation, the Union of Democratic Control.[6]


Fiction

Lee wrote a number of fictional works. This included supernatural short stories which often explored the themes of haunting and possession. She dedicated her short ghost story "A Wicked Voice" to composer Mary Augusta Wakefield in 1887. The most famous stories were collected in Hauntings (1890) and her story "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady" (1895) was first printed in the notorious The Yellow Book.

The English writer and translator Montague Summers described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction."[7][8] Summers also compared Lee's work to that of M. R. James.[9] E. F. Bleiler has claimed that "Lee's stories are really in a category by themselves. Intelligent, amusingly ironic, imaginative, original, they deserve more than the passing attention that they have attracted".[10] Neil Barron described the contents of Lee's collection Hauntings thus "The stories are powerful and very striking, among the finest of their kind."[11]

Aesthetics

Many of Lee's non-fiction works dealt with aesthetics in whole or part. She was influenced by Walter Pater and initially was involved with the Aesthetic movement. After a lengthy written correspondence, she met Pater in England in 1881, just after encountering another prominent aestheticist, Oscar Wilde.[12][13] Lee gradually moved away aestheticism, and beyond the aesthetic movement she also engaged with a huge range of thinkers from her time. Some of her non-fiction works are the following:

Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance (1884), and Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895) all deal with the Italian Renaissance on which, like Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds, she was considered an authority.[14]

Baldwin (1886) and Althea (1894) are collections of dialogues that address ethics, vivisection, religion and secularism, the morality of the novel, pessimism, the value of ideals, and other topics.[15] Another similar essay collection is Gospels of anarchy (1908) in which she discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoi, William James, as well as feminism and utopia.[16]

Lee developed a theory of psychological aesthetics in collaboration with her lover, Kit Anstruther-Thomson. This was expressed in Beauty and Ugliness (1912) and in a collection of posthumous writings of Anstruther-Thomson's that Lee edited, Art and Man (1924). Lee and Anstruther-Thomson drew on William James, Theodor Lipps, and Karl Groos. They studied our bodily responses to art-works, which cause changes in our posture, movement and breathing. These bodily responses are reflected in emotional changes which we then project into the art-works. This was how they understood our "empathy" with art-works.[17] Lee was instrumental in introducing the German concept of Einfühlung, or "empathy", into English-speaking aesthetics.[18]

Another significant work is The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (1913), written for a series of Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature.

Lee looked at literature in The Handling of Words (1923) and The Poet's Eye (1926), and at music in Music and its Lovers (1932).

Lee produced numerous essays about travel in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland, which attempted to capture the psychological effects of places rather than to convey any particular piece of information.[19]


Much of her incoming personal correspondence are preserved in Somerville College Library.[20]


Works

Tuscan Fairy Tales (1880)
  • Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880)
  • A Culture-Ghost; or, Winthrop's Adventure (1881) novella published in the April 1881 issue of Appletons' Journal.[21]
  • Belcaro, Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (1881)
  • Ottilie: An Eighteenth Century Idyl (1883)
  • The Prince of the Hundred Soups: A Puppet Show in Narrative (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: Notes on Places (1899) travel essays
  • 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 (1903)
  • Pope Jacynth – And Other Fantastic Tales (1904)
  • The Enchanted Woods, and Other Essays on the Genius of Places (1905) travel essays
  • Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child, an eighteenth-century legend (1906)
  • The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary (1906)
  • Ravenna and Her Ghosts (1907)
  • The Sentimental Traveller . Notes on Places (1908) travel essays
  • Gospels of Anarchy & Other Contemporary Studies (1908)
  • Laurus Nobilis: Chapters on Art and Life (1909)
  • In Praise of Old Gardens (1912) with others
  • Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912) with Clementine Anstruther-Thomson
  • 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) travel essays
  • Louis Norbert. A Twofold Romance (1914) novel
  • The Ballet of the Nations. A Present-Day Morality (1915) illustrations by Maxwell Armfield
  • Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (1920)
  • The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (1923)
  • Proteus or The Future Of Intelligence (1925)
  • The Golden Keys and Other Essays on the Genius Loci (1925) travel essays
  • The Poet's Eye, Notes on Some Differences Between Verse and Prose (Hogarth Press, 1926)
  • For Maurice. Five Unlikely Stories (1927)
  • Music and its Lovers: An Empirical Study of Emotional and Imaginative Responses to Music (1932)

Editions published posthumously

  • Snake Lady and Other Stories (1954)
  • Supernatural Tales (1955)
  • The Virgin of the Seven Daggers – And Other Chilling Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1962)

Bilingual editions

  • Unsere Liebe Frau der Sieben Dolche / The Virgin of the Seven Daggers, bilingual (German/English) edition. Calambac Verlag, Saarbrücken 2017. ISBN 978-3-943117-92-9.

Notes and references

  1. ^ Paget, Violet. Letter to the author's mother, Matilda Paget, dated 14 October 1890. Special Collections, Miller Library. Colby College, Waterville, ME.
  2. ^ Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Lee-Hamilton, Eugene Jacob" . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  3. ^ Colby, Vineta (2003), Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography, University of Virginia Press
  4. ^ Colby, Vineta (2003), Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography, University of Virginia Press
  5. ^ Pulham, Patricia (2008). Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. p. xi. ISBN 978-0-7546-5096-6. Her [Lee's] strong pacifist views during World War One earned her few friends in England.
  6. ^ Mario Praz, Vernon Lee, 1935[full citation needed]
  7. ^ Summers, Introduction to The Supernatural Omnibus (1931)
  8. ^ Clute, John. "Vernon Lee", E. F. Bleiler's Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror. New York: Scribner's, 1985 (pp 329-36); ISBN 0-684-17808-7
  9. ^ "She (Lee) occasionally turned to weird fiction, and earned the praise of Montague Summers who equalled her talent to that of M. R. James". Michael Ashley, Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction. Taplinger Publishing Company, 1978. ISBN 9780800882754 (p.114).
  10. ^ E. F. Bleiler, "Lee, Veron", in Jack Sullivan, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Viking, 1986. ISBN 0670809020 (p.144-5)
  11. ^ Neil Barron, Horror Literature : A Reader's Guide. New York : Garland Publishing, 1990. ISBN 0824043472.
  12. ^ Brake, Laurel (2006), Maxwell, Catherine; Pulham, Patricia (eds.), "Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle", Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 40–57, doi:10.1057/9780230287525_3, ISBN 978-0-230-28752-5, retrieved 13 March 2023
  13. ^ Dellamora, Richard (2004). "Productive Decadence: "The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought": Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde". New Literary History. 35 (4): 529–546. ISSN 0028-6087.
  14. ^ Fraser, Hilary (1992), The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, Blackwell
  15. ^ "Lee, Baldwin".
  16. ^ "Lee, Gospels of Anarchy".
  17. ^ ""The subjective inside us can turn into the objective outside", by Carolyn Burnett".
  18. ^ Wispe, Lauren (1987), "History of the Concept of Empathy", in Empathy and its Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, Cambridge University Press
  19. ^ Denisof, Dennis (2022). Decadent Ecology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  20. ^ "Special Collections". some.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  21. ^ Lee, Vernon. "Making of America Journal Articles". Appletons' Journal: A Magazine of General Literature. Retrieved 14 October 2019.

Further reading

Wikisource has the text of a 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica article about "Vernon Lee".
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vernon_Lee&oldid=1152637139"