Critical Empathy: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics and the Origins of Close Reading

Vernon Lee has recently received renewed attention for her theory of physiological empathy, which held that artworks were pleasing insofar as they provoked feelings of bodily movement. While most studies of Lee take this to be a primarily visual theory, I argue that Lee’s aim was to understand how language mediates corporeal experience. Lee’s unusual views about the physiological origin of metaphor and the promise of quantitative literary analysis formed the basis for a method of empathic close reading that was simultaneously somatic and systematic. I show that this type of reading was a significant target for the anti-affective rhetoric of the New Criticism. As such, Lee’s “critical empathy” suggests a provocative alternative to inherited practices of close reading.