Vernon Lee

{{redirect|Violet Paget|the actress "Miss Violet Paget"|Hugh Buckler}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Vernon Lee

| image = John Singer Sargent 002.jpg

| caption = Portrait of Violet Paget by John Singer Sargent

| birth_name = Violet Paget

| birth_date = {{Birth date|df=y|1856|10|14}}

| birth_place = Boulogne-sur-Mer, France

| death_date = {{Death date and age|df=y|1935|2|13|1856|10|14}}

| death_place = San Gervasio Bresciano, Italy

| resting_place =

| occupation = Short-story writer, essayist

| genre = Short story, supernatural

| notableworks =

| spouse =

| children =

| awards =

| nationality = British

| signature =

}}

Vernon Lee was the pseudonym of the French-born British writer Violet Paget (14 October 1856 – 13 February 1935). She is remembered today primarily for her supernatural fiction and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater, she wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music and travel.

Biography

File:Violet Paget - Vernon Lee ca 1870.jpg

Violet Paget was born in France on 14 OctoberPaget, Violet. Letter to the author's mother, Matilda Paget, dated 14 October 1890. Special Collections, Miller Library. Colby College, Waterville, ME. 1856, at Château St Leonard, Boulogne, to British expatriate parents, Henry Ferguson Paget and Matilda Lee-Hamilton (née Adams). Violet Paget was the half-sister of Eugene Jacob Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907){{cite DNB |wstitle=Lee-Hamilton, Eugene Jacob |supplement=2}} by her mother's first marriage, and from whose surname she adapted her own pseudonym. A maternal cousin was British suffragist Alice Abadam.{{Cite web |title=Abadam, Alice (1856–1940), suffrage activist and women’s rights campaigner |url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-112786 |access-date=2025-03-30 |website=Oxford Dictionary of National Biography |language=en |doi=10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.112786}} Although she primarily wrote for an English readership and made many visits to London, she spent the majority of her life on the continent in Europe, particularly in Italy.{{Cite web |title=Paget, Violet [pseud. Vernon Lee] (1856–1935), art historian and writer |url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-35361 |access-date=2025-03-30 |website=Oxford Dictionary of National Biography |language=en |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/35361}}

File:III Villa il Palmerino, Firenze, Italy (2).jpg, outside Florence]]

Her longest residence was at Villa Il Palmerino just outside Florence, from 1889 until her death at San Gervasio Bresciano in 1935, with a brief interruption during the First World War. Her library was left to the British Institute of Florence and can still be inspected by visitors. In Florence she knit lasting friendships with the painter Telemaco Signorini and the learned Mario Praz, and she encouraged his love of learning and English literature.

An engaged feminist, she always dressed à la garçonne. During the First World War, Lee adopted strong pacifist views{{cite book |quote=Her [Lee's] strong pacifist views during World War One earned her few friends in England. |first=Patricia |last=Pulham |title=Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales |publisher=Ashgate Publishing Ltd. |year=2008 |isbn=978-0-7546-5096-6 |page=[https://archive.org/details/trent_0116405729355/page/ xi] |url=https://archive.org/details/trent_0116405729355/page/ }} and was a member of the anti-militarist organisation the Union of Democratic Control.Mario Praz, Vernon Lee, 1935{{full citation needed|date=October 2014}} Scholars speculate that Lee was a lesbian and had long-term intense relationships with three women, Mary Robinson, Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, and British author Amy Levy.{{cite web|url=http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2010/09/empathy-lee-moral-study-others|title=You have to be kind to be cruel|publisher=New Statesman|work=Society |date=6 September 2010|access-date=3 January 2013|author=Vernon, Mark}}

She played the harpsichord and her appreciation of music animates her first major work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). In her preface to the second edition of 1907, she recalled her excitement as a girl when she came across a bundle of 18th-century music. She was so nervous that it wouldn't live up to her expectations that she escaped to the garden and listened rapturously through an open window as her mother worked out the music on the piano.Lee, Vernon (1978). Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. New York: Da Capo Press. pp. xlvii–xlviii. {{OCLC|1358401802}}. Along with Pater and John Addington Symonds, she was considered an authority on the Italian Renaissance, and wrote two works that dealt with it explicitly, Euphorion (1884) and Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).Fraser, Hilary (1992). "Studies in the History of the Renaissance", The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, Oxford: Blackwell.

Her short fiction 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. She was instrumental in the introduction of the German concept of Einfühlung, or 'empathy' into the study of aesthetics in the English-speaking world.Wispé, Lauren. "History of the Concept of Empathy." Empathy and Its Development, ed. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18.

She developed her own theory of psychological aesthetics in collaboration with her lover, Kit Anstruther-Thomson, based on previous works by William James, Theodor Lipps, and Karl Groos. She claimed that spectators "empathise" with works of art when they call up memories and associations and cause often unconscious bodily changes in posture and breathing.Rene Wellek (1970), "Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson, and Aesthetics," Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism, New Haven: Yale UP

She was known for her 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.Denisof, Dennis (2022). Decadent Ecology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Like her friend Henry James, she wrote critically about the relationship between writers and their audience, pioneering the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's personal response. She was a 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 one of Pater's most famous disciples, Oscar Wilde.{{Citation |last=Brake |first=Laurel |title=Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle |date=2006 |url=https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287525_3 |work=Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics |pages=40–57 |editor-last=Maxwell |editor-first=Catherine |access-date=2023-03-13 |place=London |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan UK |language=en |doi=10.1057/9780230287525_3 |isbn=978-0-230-28752-5 |editor2-last=Pulham |editor2-first=Patricia|url-access=subscription }}{{Cite journal |last=Dellamora |first=Richard |date=2004 |title=Productive Decadence: "The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought": Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057858 |journal=New Literary History |volume=35 |issue=4 |pages=529–546 |doi=10.1353/nlh.2005.0003 |jstor=20057858 |s2cid=162093362 |issn=0028-6087|url-access=subscription }}

Her open resistance against the Great War and her work Satan the Waster led to her being ostracized by the younger generation of scholars and writers. Feminist research led to a rediscovery since the 1990s.

Much of her incoming personal correspondence is preserved in Somerville College Library.{{cite web|url=https://www.some.ox.ac.uk/library-it/special-collections/special-collections/|website=some.ox.ac.uk|title=Special Collections|access-date=28 August 2018}}

Film of her on holiday in France in the 1930s is held in the archives of Memoire Normandie.{{Cite web |title=PORTRAIT : ANDRE NOUFFLARD - NORMANDIE IMAGES - 2011 - Mémoire normande, les collections filmiques et photographiques de Normandie ! |url=https://www.memoirenormande.fr/medias-portrait-andre-noufflard-614-6959-1-0.html |access-date=2024-02-26 |website=PORTRAIT : ANDRE NOUFFLARD - NORMANDIE IMAGES - 2011 - Mémoire normande, les collections filmiques et photographiques de Normandie ! |language=fr-FR}}

Critical reception

The English writer and translator Montague Summers described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction."Summers, Introduction to The Supernatural Omnibus (1931)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}} Summers also compared Lee's work to that of M. R. James."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). 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".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) Neil Barron described the contents of Lee's collection Hauntings thus "The stories are powerful and very striking, among the finest of their kind."Neil Barron, Horror Literature : A Reader's Guide. New York : Garland Publishing, 1990. {{ISBN|0824043472}}.

Works

File:Vernon lee, tuscan fairy tales (illustrazioni di j. stanley), londra 1880 (gabinetto vieusseux).JPG

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.{{cite journal|url=http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/acw8433.2-10.058/341|title=Making of America Journal Articles|journal=Appletons' Journal: A Magazine of General Literature|access-date=14 October 2019|last1=Lee|first1=Vernon}}
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 Publishing House, Saarbrücken 2017. {{ISBN|978-3-943117-92-9}}.

Notes and references

External links

{{Gutenberg author | id=2683}}
{{FadedPage|id=Paget, Violet|name=Violet Paget (aka Vernon Lee)|author=yes}}
{{Internet Archive author |sname=Vernon Lee}}
{{Internet Archive author |name=Violet Paget}}
{{Librivox author |id=2260}}
[http://essays.quotidiana.org/lee Essays by Vernon Lee at Quotidiana.org]
{{UK National Archives ID}}
{{isfdb name|1965|Vernon Lee}}
{{LCAuth|n50051835|Vernon Lee|79|ue}}
[https://www.greatwartheatre.org.uk/db/script/1223/ Play Ariadne in Mantua at Great War Theatre website]