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
Occupation Jane Ellen Harrison
Harrison was profoundly affected by criticisms made by MacColl of her lecturing style and her approach to art. After he voiced his critique in early 1887, she began to focus increasingly on folk religions rather...
politics Ethel Sidgwick
The Congress, held from 28 April to 1 May, attracted 1,200 women from twelve countries, both warring and neutral, to discuss means of achieving peace. Others meeting with the delegates on the subsequent peace tour...
politics Constance Lytton
CL was conscious of gender issues long before she became a supporter of the women's movement or a suffragist. In 1893 she described herself as so giddy with anger against several groups of her own...
politics Lady Ottoline Morrell
She became an activist for pacifism, a movement in which she played many roles. She joined the Union for Democratic Control , whose meetings were soon being held at her home (and whose members included...
Publishing A. Mary F. Robinson
In November AMFR adapted the story of the Magi or the Three Kings as an item in the Contemporary Review's set of Christmas legends. The story, called a The Three Kings, contains a...
Publishing A. Mary F. Robinson
The next year Robinson published a collection of historical writing, The Fields of France: Little Essays in Descriptive Sociology. Another collection of poetry, The Return to Nature: Songs and Symbols (1904), was dedicated...
Reception Mathilde Blind
Contemporary poet A. Mary F. Robinson is recorded by Vernon Lee to have said in 1881 that MB 's poetry was just among the very best written at present.
qtd. in
Demoor, Marysa. “Women Poets as Critics in the Athenæum: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol.
24
, No. 1, 1997, pp. 51-71.
53
Residence Clementina Black
By 26 November 1886, CB and her sisters had moved to Fitzroy Street, London. Vernon Lee described their home as an anti servitoress lodging , meaning that they did their housework themselves.
qtd. in
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
131
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
255
Residence A. Mary F. Robinson
After marrying Duclaux, she lived with him near Olmet, a tiny hill village in Cantal, a mountainous sub-region of the Auvergne in France. Her old friend Vernon Lee spent six weeks with them...
Textual Features A. Mary F. Robinson
She dedicates A Ballad of Forgotten Tunes to Vernon Lee , and addresses her by name in its closing stanza. She parodies the style of Pope in Celia's Homecoming, written for her sister Mabel
Textual Features A. Mary F. Robinson
Our Lady of the Broken Heart, the garden play mentioned in the volume title, is set in a public Italian garden during the seventeenth century, or any time.
Robinson, A. Mary F. Songs, Ballads, and a Garden Play. T. Fisher Unwin, 1888.
115
In the dedication, AMFR recalls...
Textual Features Amy Levy
She presents herself here explicitly as an urban poet, like the London plane tree, a human-made hybrid. The version printed here of New Love, New Life (originally titled in German and addressed to Vernon Lee
Textual Features Margaret Forster
The novel opens arrestingly as the child Gwen and her siblings struggle back into their house from a walk in wild and stormy weather. Gwen's later-famous brother is called Gus, not Augustus , to forestall...
Textual Features Amy Levy
The tone of AL 's letters is variable: early, ambitious, mostly exuberant letters are punctuated by flat, throwaway statements of her own worthlessness. To Vernon Lee she maintained a formal style, addressing her as Miss...
Textual Features Mary Agnes Hamilton
She was inspired to write it by a hatred of war, which was encouraged by political activists including such women as Vernon Lee and Lady Ottoline Morrell .
Hamilton, Mary Agnes. Remembering My Good Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1944.
72-4
Her title comes from a manifesto...

Timeline

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Texts

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