Biography: Vernon Lee

BOOK REVIEWS commercialism and the new commodity culture feed the New Woman's capacity to exploit spectacle, seduce opponents, and encroach on forbidden male territory. These are among the particularly valuable insights that Roberts offers to cultural historians as well as to feminist theorists and literary critics in this excellent book. Maureen moran ------------------------ Brunei University, London Biography: Vernon Lee Viñeta Colby. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. jriv + 387 pp. $39.50 TO KNOW of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) is to recognize and celebrate her importance to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. What scholar of these eras has not come across her name? We typically hear of her in relation to the many figures she knew, among them: John Singer Sargent, Robert Browning, Walter Pater, J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, William James, Bernard Berenson, Edith Wharton , Lady Ottoline Morrel, Ouida, Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey . Indeed, to think about her at all is to consider lists; she wrote history, art history, musicology, philosophy, psychology, novels, short stories , personal essays, political journalism, a play, and travel literature. Publication began for her in 1875, when she was nineteen, and continued steadily until her death in 1935. Yet to know much more about her, as Viñeta Colby makes possible with this valuable biography, is to encounter difficulties: Lee's, and therefore, ours. The size of the oeuvre (huge) and the quality of the prose (uneven) led Bernard Berenson to write that Lee "spat out" ink and "oozed" words. Lest we mistakenly attribute such negativity solely to a sexist abhorrence of intellectual women, let us consider Virginia Woolf s comment, which Colby quotes: "I am sobbing with misery over Vernon Lee, who turns all good writing to vapour with her fluency and insipidity ." Lee herself sometimes felt the same way, apologizing on several ocasions for lapses in her writing, and toward the end of her life reckoning , "I have written far too much, sickeningly too much." Yet we would be wrong to overlook the riches of her works, and critical interest in her quite rightly flourishes. Not only did she span chronologically the Victorian, turn-of-the-century, and inter-war periods, but she also brought a deep understanding of continental culture to British letters . She addressed serious issues of the day from a liberal perspective, writing as a Dreyfusard, pacifist, feminist, and antivivisectionist; men197 ELT 47 : 2 2004 tored many women (Edith Wharton said that she was the first intellectual woman she had ever met); understood the importance and vulnerability of the imagination and the spirit in a world sorely in need of them; and wrote works that may still strike us as fascinating and beautiful. The daughter of peripatetic British parents, she grew up in Italian, German, French, and Swiss pensions, and was largely self-taught. Colby presents us with a father who had literally "gone fishing" most of the time, and a mother who openly preferred Lee's half-brother, Eugene, devoting herself to the care of this hysterically paralyzed son until her death, at which time he rose to walk again. The family settled outside Florence in 1873, in a house which Lee eventually bought and inhabited between frequent trips elsewhere on the Continent and to England. Everywhere she went, she stayed with old friends and met new artists and writers. Although always attracted to women, Lee was, Colby tells us, incapable of giving or receiving physical affection. Two intense love relationships, one with the writer Mary Robinson and one with Kit Anstruther-Thomson, ended, as did several important friendships. At the loss of Mary Robinson, she suffered a series of nervous breakdowns from 1887 to 1896, managing nevertheless to produce three books during that time. Life with people, when it damaged her, could always be repaired by the act of writing—or speaking. She loved to converse, but in this realm, too, people often felt that she overdid it. Colby sums up their complaints with the apt phrase "avalanche of talk." In fact, the writer whose career most closely resembles hers is Ruskin. Many have tried to contain his verbosity under the rubric "Victorian sage," meaning primarily that he was...