"Vernon Lee": A Commentary and an Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Her

"VERNON LEE" : A COMMENTARY AND AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS ABOUT HER BY CARL MARKGRAF (Portland State University) The letters now available at Colby College doubtless will provide scholarship with a wider and deeper knowledge of Violet Paget's background and character, of her relationships with others in the literary and artistic world—in which she was certainly a person to be reckoned with, and of her feelings toward that world. However, from what has been so far published (largely In Colby Library Quarterly) the emerging picture of VL seems to differ not at all from what has long been available through secondary sources and, more recently, Peter Gunn's biography of her. Virginia Woolf s comments, those of Henry James, Maurice Baring, Marie BellocLowndes , John Addington Symonds, Bernard Berenson, Mary Robinson, Dame Ethel Smyth, and even Irene Cooper Willis, her literary heir and executrix, all agree in their graphic depictions of this brilliant but impossible personality. The year before she burst upon the London scene, at the age of twenty-four, she had already produced a major work of criticism—Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy—which was itself virtually uncriticisable. Overnight she was the expert in the field. Not that the work was an overnight production, for she had been working at it since she was fourteen. From childhood she had been expected to be the literary lion of the family. But she was to become what Henry James called her, not a lion, but a "tiger-cat." She was not lionized, she was shunned, but shunned with considerable respect, for her intellect, if not for her qualities as human being. That impression comes through in all the writings about her, and indeed there is something of awe—the awe that translates itself into cruel envy—among those who seemed to know her best. She was brilliant. But such brilliance needs to take pains to avoid paining others; with rare exceptions, such as her half-brother Eugene LeeHamilton , and the younger women who became part of her intellectual life, we get little indication of human warmth and fellow-feeling from what she wrote or what was written about her. We have much to suggest the contrary. While she was clearly a friend to mankind—her pacifist writings cost her too dearly to deny that, she considered the effort of gaining and keeping friendships with individuals not worth the cost. As she tells in one of the letters privately printed—expressly against her wishes—two years after her death, she valued intellectual pleasures highly enough to trade off "the pleasures of loving and sharing and sorrowing with our fellowcreatures ." This led to a condition of emotional atrophy which Virginia Woolf described in her as if she were some Insect emerging from a pupa-case: she had "completed her shape, and was sun dried and shell like." But it was not a condition arrived at late in life. In the year of her London glory from Studies of the Eighteenth Century In Italy (1880), she published her first novel, Miss Brown (1884). Her thinly disguised portraits of friends and acquaintances in this satire of the Aesthetes did not amuse either the critics or those portrayed. That Vernon Lee was surprised at the reception her tastelessness evoked—she was cut dead by those who found themselves ridiculed—is symptomatic of her failure to feel with others. Empathy, the term for which she became noted in aesthetic criticism years later, for her seemed limited to 268 the contemplation of art objects, not other people, despite its Aristotelian meaning of feeling "with" another person. All this once said, likeable or not, Vernon Lee was a force to be contended with. As Professor Mannocchi's bibliography shows, her ideas were widely published and in several languages■Collections of her short works continue to appear. Her ideas about fiction writing are more and more recognized as antedating some of Henry James's theories. As to her contemporaries, she was known to and in contact with nearly all the luminaries of her day. Reviewed by Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw, advised by John Addington Symonds about her stylistic flaws (his ignored warnings are reiterated...