Vernon Lee

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Standard Name: Lee, Vernon
Birth Name: Violet Paget
Pseudonym: Vernon Lee
VL 's writing career spanned more than five decades during the later the nineteenth century and the earlier twentieth. She wrote critical monographs, essays, and reviews (on aesthetics, politics, and history), as well as short stories, novels, and drama. Much of her work is currently out of print. However two books published in 2003 mark a renewed interest in Lee's life's work: Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography by Vineta Colby , and Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual by Christa Zorn .
Head-and-shoulders portrait sketch of Vernon Lee by John Singer Sargent, done in a single three-hour sitting, 1881. Her hair is short and dark; she wears a black sweater over a white shirt, and wire-rimmed spectacles. Tate Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Ethel Smyth
ES 's many other friends included writer Maurice Baring , Lady Ponsonby , the Empress Eugénie of France, Vernon Lee , and Vita Sackville-West .
Collis, Louise. Impetuous Heart: The Story of Ethel Smyth. William Kimber, 1984.
57, 65, 174, 200
St John, Christopher. Ethel Smyth. Longmans, Green, 1959.
117-18
Friends, Associates Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
During these last years many friends, both from Edinburgh and from earlier times in HCJ 's life, remained faithful visitors or letter-writers: these included members of the Constable publishing family, John Ruffini , and Vernon Lee .
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Fleeming Jenkin. “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin”. Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., edited by Sir Sidney Colvin et al., Longmans, Green, 1877, p. 1: xi - clxx.
cxlvii
Friends, Associates Jessie Ellen Cadell
JEC 's friends in London included the scholar Richard Garnett (superintendent of the British Museum reading room and future father-in-law of another translator, Constance Garnett ). They met in 1877 or 1878, and Richard Garnett...
Friends, Associates Constance Smedley
Their London associates included writers and artists like (besides Margaret Morris herself) Vernon Lee , Gladys Henrietta Schütze or Henrietta Leslie (a next-door neighbour in Chelsea, and with her husband one of the only non-theatrical...
Friends, Associates Sarah Orne Jewett
SOJ had a broad social circle. She belonged to an artistic community of women that included Celia Thaxter and Louise Guiney , and counted Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose funeral she and Annie Fields attended in...
Friends, Associates Ellen Mary Clerke
EMC 's friends included Vernon Lee and Agnes Mary Frances Robinson .
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Friends, Associates Gladys Henrietta Schütze
GHS also knew and loved the greatOlive Schreiner .
Schütze, Gladys Henrietta. More Ha’pence Than Kicks. Jarrolds.
128-9
Vernon Lee , she said, was primarily a friend of her scientist husband; they both stayed with her several times. Schütze pondered the paradox...
Friends, Associates Mary Kingsley
In CambridgeMK developed close female friendships for the first time. The women included Hatty Johnson , Clara Skeat , and Agnes Smith Lewis . Lucy Toulmin Smith , first female head of a public...
Friends, Associates Frances Power Cobbe
There she met and became a friend of Violet Paget , who was then newly published under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. By the early 1890s, FPC had become friendly with another late Victorian writer: Katharine Bradley
Friends, Associates Michael Field
Katharine and Edith Cooper shared a great many distinguished friends in the worlds of literature and aesthetics: Walter Pater , Oscar Wilde , Arthur Symons , Charles Shannon , Sarianna Browning , Thomas Sturge Moore
Friends, Associates F. Mabel Robinson
FMR shared to the full the social involvement of her family with entertaining leading figures in London cultural life: such men as John Singer Sargent , Robert Browning , William Morris , and Oscar Wilde
Friends, Associates Walter Pater
From his time at BrasenoseWP knew Oscar Browning . In Oxford and London he socialized with Edmund Gosse , Algernon Charles Swinburne , Simeon Solomon , Oscar Wilde , Vernon Lee , A. Mary F. Robinson
Friends, Associates Amy Levy
They included Olive Schreiner , the future Beatrice Webb , Dollie Maitland Radford , Margaret Harkness , Clementina Black (whose sister Constance had been a school friend of AL ), and Eleanor Marx . Through...
Friends, Associates Isabella Ormston Ford
Besides the Ford sisters, other members of the UDC included founding member James Ramsay MacDonald , executive committee member Helena Swanwick , and Vernon Lee , who was a good friend of IOF 's sister...
Friends, Associates A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR and Vernon Lee attended a tea-party at John Singer Sargent 's London studio.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003.
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Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Lee, Vernon. Vanitas. W. Heinemann, 1892.
Lee, Vernon. Vernon Lee’s Letters. Editor Cooper-Willis, Irene, Privately printed for the editor for private circulation only, 1937.
Lee, Vernon. Vital Lies. John Lane, 1912, 2 vols.