"A Legion of Ghosts": Vernon Lee (1856-1935) and the Art of Nostalgia

I began this essay thinking that I would discuss the unhappy history of the author Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and her first serious love, the poet A. Mary F. Robinson, a relationship that lasted from 1880 until Robinson's abrupt decision to marry the French linguist James Darmesteter in 1887. Like so many of Lee's own essays and stories, however, my research grew and changed direction, so that I now concentrate not on a relationship but on its memory. This essay focuses on how Lee used nostalgia, the reshaping of past experience, to explore both her own history and that of Italy. Driven by a need to intellectualize all knowledge and experience, throughout her life Lee was also passionately involved with a series of women who supported her ambitions. By displacing her powerful homoerotic feelings onto an imagined past, she was able to combine emotion and intellect in a creative and fruitful way. In this essay I look at how a vibrant, supple nostalgia was fundamental to her most important areas of writing: aesthetics, travel essays, and horror stories.

A complex and contradictory emotion, nostalgia has been critically neglected until recently, perhaps because it is so pervasive in late-nineteenth-century writing.¹ Homoerotic nostalgia is so common that I need only mention the poems of A. E. Housman for readers to recall how he warmly memorializes what was or might have been. Each poem in A Shropshire Lad (1896) seems saturated with nostalgia for "an athlete dying young," "the lads that will never be old," "the land of lost content," or "the happy highways where I went / And cannot come again."² Death—both of the experience of love and of the mortal body—is anticipated and even embraced. Certainly, the fin de siècle mood encouraged authors as various as the imperialist Rider Haggard and the young Irish poet William Butler Yeats to indulge in bittersweet memories. But Housman's carefully coded poems subtly alter the sorrow of passing time. All writers ponder the meaning and mutability of life, but he celebrated an unfulfilled love that was the very source of his creativity; he turned desire that cannot achieve earthly fulfillment into a powerful generative source of his poetry. Vernon Lee used nostalgia for different purposes. For her, it was not so much about unfulfilled desire as it was an imagined place where one might experience a purer love; the re-created past came to represent fulfilled love. This personal love for actual persons mingled with her passionate love for places and characters from Italy's past.

Nostalgia, combining the Greek words for "return" and "sorrow," was coined in the late seventeenth century. Originally, it was applied to gravely ill Swiss mercenary soldiers suffering from homesickness for their mountain homes. The psychological effects of homesickness and longing soon dominated medical discussions, however, and by the early nineteenth century nostalgia had taken on its present-day meaning.³ In the process, it became a bourgeois illness, a special sensibility to be shared with others as a sign of one's sensitivity to the past and refusal to let it go. Nostalgia also became shorthand for self-indulgence, a refusal to prepare for the future. More recently, the phenomenologist James G. Hart has advocated the positive attributes of nostalgia, finding in "the poignancy of its pain, its unique bitter-sweetness," a means of disclosing "to us the most fundamental meaning of ourselves" while also showing "us that we are ineluctably separated from this reality."⁴ Hart even asserts that the imagined past is an "extra temporal" moment when one can grasp one's life as a whole and thereby gain a glimpse of eternity, of a supreme mythos. His version of nostalgia is close to Lee's insofar as nostalgia both takes the subject out of time and marks the relentless passage of time. It allows an individual to envision a purified past, to make it come alive for the present in order to prepare for the potential sorrows of the future. If one feels anguish over the loss of...