Vernon Lee
Encyclopedia
Supernatural fiction
Supernatural fiction is a literary genre exploiting or requiring as plot devices or themes some contradictions of the commonplace natural world and materialist assumptions about it....
and her work on aesthetics. An early follower of Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, she also wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel.
Biography
She was born at Château St Leonard, BoulogneBoulogne-sur-Mer
-Road:* Metropolitan bus services are operated by the TCRB* Coach services to Calais and Dunkerque* A16 motorway-Rail:* The main railway station is Gare de Boulogne-Ville and located in the south of the city....
, France to expatriate English parents. She was the half-sister of Eugene Lee-Hamilton
Eugene Lee-Hamilton
Eugene Lee-Hamilton was a late Victorian English poet. His work includes some notable sonnets in the style of Petrarch. He endowed a literary prize administered by Oriel College in Oxford University, where he was a student...
, adapting her pseudonym from his surname. Although she primarily wrote for an English audience and made many visits to London, she spent the majority of her life on the continent, particularly in Italy. Her longest residence was on the hillside just outside of Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, in the Palmerino villa, from 1889 until her death, with a brief interruption during the war. Her library was left to the British Institute of Florence and can still be inspected by visitors. In Florence she knit lasting friendships with the painter Telemaco Signorini
Telemaco Signorini
Telemaco Signorini was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.He was born in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the...
and the learned Mario Praz
Mario Praz
Mario Praz KBE was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony , was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries...
, and she encouraged his love of learning and English literature. An engaged feminist, she always dressed á la garçonne, and was a member of the Union of Democratic Control
Union of Democratic Control
The Union of Democratic Control was a British pressure group formed in 1914 to press for a more responsive foreign policy. While not a pacifist organization, it was opposed to military influence in government.-World War I:...
. She was also a lesbian, and had long-term passionate friendships with two women, Mary Robinson and Kit Anstruther-Thomson.
She played the harpsichord well, and her appreciation of music animates her first major work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). In her preface to the second edition of 1907, she recalled her excitement as a girl when she came across a bundle of 18th-century music. She was so nervous that it wouldn't live up to her expectations that she escaped to the garden and listened rapturously through an open window as her mother worked out the music on the piano. Along with Pater and John Addington Symonds
John Addington Symonds
John Addington Symonds was an English poet and literary critic. Although he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships. He referred to it as l'amour de l'impossible...
, she was considered an authority on the Italian Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, and wrote two works that dealt with it explicitly, Euphorion (1884) and Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895).
Her short fiction explored the themes of haunting and possession. The English writer and translator Montague Summers
Montague Summers
Augustus Montague Summers was an eccentric English author and clergyman. He is known primarily for his scholarly work on the English drama of the 17th century, as well as for his idiosyncratic studies on witches, vampires, and werewolves, in all of which he professed to believe...
described Vernon Lee as "the greatest [...] of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction." The most famous were collected in Hauntings (1890) and her story "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady" (1895) was first printed in the notorious The Yellow Book.
She was responsible for introducing the German concept of Einfühlung, or empathy
Empathy
Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
into the study of aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
in England. She developed her own theory of psychological aesthetics in collaboration with her lover, Kit Anstruther-Thomson, based on previous work by William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
, Theodor Lipps
Theodor Lipps
Theodor Lipps was a German philosopher. Lipps was one of the most influential German university professors of his time, attracting many students from other countries. Lipps was very concerned with conceptions of art and the aesthetic, focusing much of his philosophy around such issues...
, and Karl Groos
Karl Groos
Karl Groos was a psychologist who proposed an evolutionary instrumentalist theory of play...
. She claimed that spectators "empathise" with works of art when they call up memories and associations and cause often unconscious bodily changes in posture and breathing.
She was also well known for her numerous essays about travel in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland which attempted to capture the psychological effects of places rather than to convey any particular piece of information. "The Lie of the Land", in the volume "Limbo, and other Essays", had an influence on the study of landscaping
Landscaping
Landscaping refers to any activity that modifies the visible features of an area of land, including:# living elements, such as flora or fauna; or what is commonly referred to as gardening, the art and craft of growing plants with a goal of creating a beautiful environment within the landscape.#...
.
Like her friend and colleague Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, she wrote critically about the relationship between writers and their audience, pioneering the idea of critical assessment among all the arts as relating to an audience's personal response. She was a strong, though vexed, proponent of the Aesthetic movement, and after a lengthy written correspondence met the movement's effective leader, Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, in England in 1881, just after encountering his famous disciple Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
. Her interpretation of the movement called for social action, which set her apart from Pater.
Works
- Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880)
- Ottilie: An Eighteenth Century Idyl (1883)
- The Prince of the Hundred Soups: A Puppet Show in Narrative (1883)
- Belcaro, Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions (1883)
- The Countess of Albany (1884)
- Miss Brown (1884) novel
- Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance (1884)
- Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (1886)
- A Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story (1886) novella, also Oke of Okehurst, Alice Oke
- Juvenilia, Being a second series of essays on sundry aesthetical questions (1887)
- Hauntings. Fantastic Stories (1890)
- Vanitas: Polite Stories (1892)
- Althea: Dialogues on Aspirations & Duties (1894)
- Renaissance Fancies And Studies Being A Sequel To Euphorion (1895)
- Art and Life (1896)
- Limbo and Other Essays (1897)
- Genius Loci (1899) travel
- The Child In The Vatican (1900)
- In Umbria: A Study of Artistic Personality (1901)
- Chapelmaster Kreisler A Study of Musical Romanticists (1901)
- Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century (1903)
- The Legend of Madame Krasinska (1903)
- Ariadne in Mantua: a Romance in Five Acts (1903)
- Hortus Vitae: Essays on the Gardening of life (1904)
- Pope Jacynth – And Other Fantastic Tales (1904)
- The Enchanted Woods (1905) essays
- The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (1906)
- Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child, an eighteenth-century legend (1906)
- The Spirit of Rome (1906)
- Ravenna and Her Ghosts (1907)
- The Sentimental Traveller . Notes on Places (1908)
- Gospels of Anarchy & Other Contemporary Studies (1908)
- Laurus Nobili: Chapters on Art and Life (1909)
- In Praise of Old Gardens (1912) with others
- Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent Obscurantism ( 1912).
- The Beautiful. An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (1913)
- The Tower of the Mirrors and Other Essays on the Spirit of Places (1914)
- Louis Norbert. A Twofold Romance (1914) novel
- The Ballet of the Nations. A Present-Day Morality (1915) illustrations by Maxfield Armfield
- Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy (1920)
- Proteus or The Future Of Intelligence (1925)
- The Golden Keys (1925) essays
- The Poet's Eye (Hogarth Press, 1926)
- For Maurice. Five Unlikely Stories (1927)
- Music and its Lovers (1932)
- Snake Lady and Other Stories (1954)
- Supernatural Tales (1955)
- The Virgin of the Seven Daggers – And Other Chilling Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1962)