In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

"VERNON LEE": A REINTRODUCTION AND PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY By Phyllis F. Mannocchi (Colby College) In 1881 on the first of her annual visits to England from her home in Florence, Vernon Lee [Violet Paget] had her portrait painted by her childhood friend, John Singer Sargent. Later, Maurice Baring, another close friend of Vernon Lee's, wrote of her portrait that it is successful in depicting her real presence because it emphasizes "the piercing gleam of her intelligent eyes." It was her intelligence, so striking in both her writing and in her conversation, which was most often remarked upon by the writers and artists who made up Vernon Lee's wide circle of friends and colleagues. Many of their impressions of Lee were as glowing as Baring's; he recalls her as "by far the cleverest person I ever met in myolife, and the person possessed with the widest range ot the rarest culture. ..." Henry James provides a very different view of Lee's intellect in one vivid analysis of her; in a letter to his brother William warning him away from a visit to Vernon Lee, he writes: "... she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent which is saying a great deal. Her vigour and sweep of intellect are most rare and her talk superior altogether." After commenting that in her books, "there is a great second-rate element in her firstrateness ," James adds that where friendship is concerned, "she's a tiger-cat!" Conflicting impressions like these, and the personality that gave rise to them, would make Vernon Lee a controversial figure throughout her life. At the same time, even as her popularity waned, the force of her intellect would continue to lead her to express her strong, individual views and to undertake new and original pursuits, and to the end of her life, in a larger number of fields than previously acknowledged, Vernon Lee would continue to exert a significant influence. It was early recognition of her intelligence which.had led her family to bring her up "in an atmosphere of fantastic prodigy-worship." Born in 1856 near Boulogne, France, to well-to-do, unconventional parents who preferred travelling on the Continent to residence in England, Vernon Lee received her education primarily from her mother and her half-brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton. Destined for a career as a woman of letters, she was "trained for art and literature as most girls of her generation were trained for marriage and domesticity." Before she was out of her teens, she had chosen to be identified, both personally and professionally, as "Vernon Lee," rather than by her real name, Violet Paget, because as she wrote to her first literary mentor, Mrs. Henrietta Jenkin, "I am sure no one reads a woman's writing on art, history, or aesthetics with anything but mitigated [sic] contempt." By the time she was fourteen, her first historical sketches had been published in the Swiss newspaper La Famille, and she had begun research into the life and work of Metastasio and the long-neglected Arcadian Academy. This was to lead to her pioneering work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), her most famous book, which is often cited as responsible for reviving interest in eighteenth century Italian literature and music. Regarded as an "amazingly learned book for a young woman of 24 to have written," it gained her entry to the literary and artistic circles that included among itsyprominent members Robert Browning, Walter Pater, Leslie Stephen, and Edmund Gosse ; and throughout the 1880s and 1890s she recorded her detailed observations of these circles in her entertaining "letters home" to her mother and half-brother. Throughout this period, her literary reputation became more established, as she published supernatural and historical fiction, travel essays, and works on ethics, aesthetics, and medieval and Renaissance culture. In 1884, 231 Miss Brown, Vernon Lee's three-decker novel satirizing aestheticism and the "fleshly school" of art, provoked several harsh attacks from influential critics and embarrassed silences from friends and colleagues. Yet it was not until the late 1890s and her almost exclusive concentration on the field of psychological aesthetics that she found herself truly isolated from...

pdf

Share