Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (review)

In an 1899 letter to Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck (later the literary hostess Lady Morrell), Vernon Lee wrote, "I have often had a little passing dream of trying to give you the benefit ... of my additional twenty years of reading, thinking, and in practical life. ... I can teach you infinitely less than any person at Oxford, but I think we might think things out together, which is sometimes quite as fruitful." Cavendish-Bentinck declined the offer. Several of the main themes of Vineta Colby's impressive study are expressed in this invitation: Lee's outsider status as a woman intellectual; her confidence in her intellectual prowess; and her lifelong search for female love and companionship through the life of the mind.

Before she was twenty Violet Paget adopted the pen name "Vernon Lee" for a series of articles on English novelists for the Italian journal La rivista europea. She did so because she was convinced "no one reads a woman's writing on art, history or aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt." Born in France in 1856, Lee was an English national who chose to live in Italy most of her life, feeling it to be her true spiritual and intellectual home. Although she is now known chiefly for her writing on art and aesthetics and for a series of ghost stories published during the1890s, she wrote in nearly every genre but poetry. Taking her cue from Lee's own description of the human psyche as protean, Colby renders Lee a complex, often lonely figure, born "too late to be a Victorian, too early to be a Modernist."

Fluent in several languages, Lee wrote mainly for English audiences. Her first article for the English press, "Tuscan Peasant Plays," appeared in Fraser's Magazine in February 1877. According to Colby's calculation, nearly every year from then until 1933 (she died in 1935) saw Lee's work in English, American, or European periodicals. Lee's journalism was stronger than her book publications and her conversation; readers and listeners alike were often alienated by her idiosyncratic prose and pedantic, unceasing talk. She was no stranger to negative, sometimes hostile reviews, partly owing to her abrasive personality and insensitivity to others' feelings, even those of her friends. In one fascinating chapter Colby describes how Lee incensed much of the literary and artistic establishment with her 1884 novel Miss Brown, dedicated to Henry James (to his chagrin). The novel attacked the aesthetic movement for its moral hedonism, and featured thinly veiled, unflattering characterizations of her peers. Lee's friendship with James ended permanently over her 1892 short story "Lady Tal," in which she crudely caricatured him as the "dainty but frugal bachelor" Jervase Marion. In contrast with her fiction, Colby notes that Lee's journalism was more "lucid and informative." She published on art, literature, history, aesthetics, travel, music, economics, politics, and social issues in such venues as the Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Review, Quarterly Review, North American Review, and New Statesman. Here too she invited controversy. Her pacifist stance during World War I led to a fierce debate with H. G. Wells in 1914 in the Labour Leader and the Nation, spelling the end of their friendship.

Although she published broadly, Lee never enjoyed a wide audience. She was esoteric, uncompromising, often quick to conclude, a resolute generalist in a time of increasing specialization. From London in 1893 she wrote to her brother, "At thirty-seven I have no public." This was something of an overstatement on Lee's part. In any case, Lee wrote not for money but for intellectual satisfaction to a small and elite audience. Although Mary Ward had advised her to write literary criticism on new publications more regularly, in order to establish "a clear identity before the public," Lee demurred: "I find that I should have to write on actualities, new books, new editions, at the choice of an Editor. ... I cannot sacrifice all intellectual private life to reading up for articles."

Colby's biography opens...