Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (review)

With this book, the first full-length study of Vernon Lee's work since Burdett Gardner's The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian Style) – which, although published in 1987, was written as a dissertation in 1954 – Christa Zorn makes an important and long overdue contribution to the increasing critical interest in Vernon Lee's work.

Building on recent scholarship which "produc[es] a new awareness of the material role the fin-de-siècle played in modern intellectual and literary movements and of the wide-ranging involvement of women writers in all of them" (xii), Zorn addresses the only recently acknowledged difference between the "New Woman" writers and female aesthetes. For generations critics have tended either to see all female writers of this period as New Women, or simply to ignore the aesthetes altogether, particularly in light of the fact that the aestheticist movement has long been considered male-centered. Including such boundary-crossing writers as Lee in discussions of late-Victorian aestheticism challenges the terms of those categories. Interestingly, Zorn links her long neglect with the very attributes which make her interesting to us today: "her contradictions, her national transcendence, and her interdisciplinarity" (20).

Lee is a notoriously challenging writer from a number of viewpoints: gender, genre, nationality; yet Zorn expertly guides the reader through these treacherous waters. For example, although Lee grew up in several different European countries, giving her a broadly continental perspective, she published primarily in England, where, as Zorn notes, the growing fascination with Italian culture supported a large readership. Lee's unusually broad perspective drew readers to her richly knowledgeable writings, but also at times alienated them, causing her, for example, to be ostracized during World War I. Additionally, as with her colleagues Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds, much of Vernon Lee's work was originally written for periodicals and only later collected into books; unlike them, however, Lee did not have the advantage of the authority that comes with a university education. She was writing, Zorn explains, in a historical moment when a new gap was developing between the traditionally protean form of the personal essay and the formal, critical essay written in accordance with academic standards, the latter gaining in intellectual authority while the former was increasingly considered merely frivolous. In any case, Lee's nonfiction writing tended to hover somewhere between the two, borrowing attributes from either side and provoking discomfort in reviewers from all perspectives. (Zorn's examination, in chapter three, "Between the Lines of Gender and Genre," of Lee"s struggles with form and credibility as an essayist who often wrote for periodicals dominated by university-educated men, will particularly interest readers concerned with Victorian periodical writing.)

Lee's approach to gender concerns was equally slippery. In chapter four, "Literary Form and Alternative Subjectivity," Zorn shrewdly examines Lee's complex relationship to the "Woman Question," analyzing, for example, the ambiguous messages in Lee's one arguably feminist essay, "The Economic Dependence of Women" (79–87). Despite Lee's lifelong avoidance of overt feminism, this essay demonstrates the depth of her thinking on the topic of women's roles. Ultimately, Zorn finds Lee's aesthetic conclusion to the "Woman question in this essay a kind of cop-out, or a "dissol[ution] ... [into] an androgynous vision of sameness" (87). This assessment may strike some readers as unfair, as Zorn has already lauded Lee's rescue of aestheticism from its dangerous proximity to "mere" hedonism, recovering its potential for responsible liberatory power (79). However, Zorn's discussion of this essay and other works documenting Lee's notions about gender is rigorously intelligent.

One interesting tension the reader uncovers in the book is that between Vernon Lee's almost militantly non-essentialist perspective with regard to gender (outlined in numerous passages quoted by Zorn) and Zorn's own propensity to burden her with somewhat overgeneralizing phrases such as "female subjectivity" (166). This tension is only partly mitigated by the identification of "female...