Who Was Vernon Lee?

In life and in death, Vernon Lee has always been something of an anomaly. An Englishwoman by birth living in continental Europe, her ties to Italy in particular, as well as her pacifism, meant that she was viewed with suspicion following the outbreak of the First World War. Yet, born in 1856, she belonged to the Victorian era and was an outsider among certain pacifist circles, such as the Bloomsbury Group, some members of which praised her later work. Here, we will take a closer look at the life and work of Vernon Lee and try to make sense of a writer so resistant to categorization.

Violet Paget—later known as Vernon Lee, in both her writing and private life—was born on October 14, 1856 in the Château St Leonard, outside Boulogne-sur-Mer. She received little formal education and had a peripatetic childhood, living in various parts of Europe, though mainly in France and Italy. According to her biographer, Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee was “English by nationality, French by accident of birth [and] Italian by choice” (see Further Reading, Colby, p. 1).

Her mother was born Matilda Adams in 1815 in Carmarthenshire, Wales. She had previously been married to Captain James Lee-Hamilton, with whom she had a son (Paget’s half-brother) named Eugene before Lee-Hamilton died in 1852. In creating her nom de plume, the surname “Lee” was borrowed from that of her half-brother and mother’s first husband.

Vernon Lee’s mother met Henry Ferguson-Paget (a man of Anglo-French heritage and the future father of Vernon Lee) when she hired him as Eugene’s tutor before the couple married in 1855. Before moving to France in 1849 and taking up his post as Eugene’s tutor, Henry Ferguson-Paget had studied engineering in Warsaw, where he had been involved in the Greater Poland uprising of 1848.

During a childhood holiday, Lee befriended Emily and John Singer Sargent, the latter of whom would go on to be a celebrated artist. Lee and Emily remained lifelong friends, and John and Emily’s mother became something of a surrogate mother to Lee, whose own mother—though she shared her love and talent for music with her daughter—was somewhat emotionally distant, paying greater attention to Eugene.

Though she received little formal education, Lee was nonetheless a precocious writer, publishing her first in a series of articles on contemporary novelists writing in English in the Italian journal La Rivista Europea in 1875. This marks the birth of “Vernon Lee” as Violet Paget’s pseudonym and writing persona.

Lee’s early success paved the way for her career as a published author in British, American, and continental European journals. As Colby states, there was “almost no year between 1877 and 1933 without some representation of her work in English, American, or European periodicals” (see Further Reading, Colby, p. 23). By the age of 21, she had published essays on art, literature, music, and aesthetics in leading journals of the period.

Lee’s first book, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was originally published in Fraser’s Magazine between 1878 and 1879. Her nonfiction work, however, is most deeply informed by her subscription to the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater. As Vineta Colby states, “Pater’s endorsement of art for its own sake inspired her […] because of its commitment to the Platonic ideals of truth, purity, and beauty. In this respect, she was indeed, as some of her contemporaries called her, ‘Walter Pater’s disciple’” (See Further Reading, Colby, p. 56).

Pater’s aestheticism also appealed to Lee—as an Englishwoman living in continental Europe—as it promised an alternative to what Colby calls “a Puritan-Calvinist tradition that had too long isolated England from the rich cultures of the Continent, particularly France and Italy” (see Further Reading, Colby, p. 56). Her next book, Belcaro, was explicitly Paterian and received praise from Pater himself, who also solicited her opinion on his own work. The two maintained a friendly relationship from 1881 to his death in 1894.

In 1883, Lee made her first substantial foray into adult fiction with the publication of the novella Ottilie: An Eighteenth Century Idyl. The narrative is split between an essayist (who lacks confidence in their ability to relate the story) and an unnamed voyager visiting a provincial German town. Here, he encounters a man, referred to as “The Poet,” and his sister. Though the sister is the first to die, The Poet’s death leads to the discovery of a manuscript titled “My Confession – 1809,” the substance of which then forms the basis of the story.

Also in 1883, Lee’s partner Mary Robinson published a biography of Emily Brontë in W. H. Allen’s Eminent Women Series. As part of her research, Robinson interviewed Ellen Nussey, the long-term friend of Charlotte Brontë and surviving residents of Haworth who could remember the famous literary family. As part of the same series, Lee contributed The Countess of Albany.

“In sympathetically portraying a married woman who takes a lover,” as Colby states, Lee’s choice of subject matter “shocked Victorian readers” (see Further Reading, Colby, p. 88).

While The Countess of Albany shocked her readers, Lee’s first full-length novel, Miss Brown (1884), led to her being ostracized by certain fellow writers, intellectuals, and artists. The novel centers on the eponymous Miss Anne Brown, an impoverished young woman who becomes the muse and protégée of Walter Hamlin, an artist and poet, who is revived from his depression upon meeting her in a country villa near Lucca. While she inspires his art, Hamlin also commits to educating Anne in matters of culture by lending her books to read and chaperoning her on trips to the opera. His largesse even extends to paying for her formal education, furnishing her with her own income, and buying her a house in London.

Once her education is complete, Anne is free to decide whether she wishes to marry him or not. Anne’s education, however, allows her to see not only Hamlin’s personal shortcomings but those endemic to the social circles in which he moves. Though Lee had once been a great admirer of Oscar Wilde, in Miss Brown, she casts him as Posthlethwaite (Wilde had already been lampooned in Punch as Jellaby Postlethwaite). Additionally, Anne Brown herself was widely thought to have been based on Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris.

The likenesses between her characters and well-known cultural figures left Lee open to a great deal of criticism and ostracism within contemporary literary and artistic circles—so much so that Henry James, to whom the novel had been dedicated, sought to distance himself from what he saw to be an artistic failure on Lee’s part. Her friendship with James would later come to a close in 1893 over her story “Lady Tal.”

In addition to her professional troubles, Lee’s long-term partner, Mary Robinson, got engaged to James Darmesteter, the shock of which led to Lee having a breakdown in November 1887. She would later suffer a relapse in August 1888. During her long convalescence, however, she wrote three books: Juvenilia (1887), Althea (1894), and Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to Euphorion (1894). The latter was published in the same year as the death of Walter Pater and closes with the essay “Valedictory,” in which she eulogizes Pater while also heralding a new era in her own work. This would be the final book Lee published on the Renaissance period.

Also during her convalescence in the wake of Mary Robinson’s engagement and subsequent marriage, Lee began a new relationship with Clementina “Kit” Anstruther-Thomson. Working in collaboration with Anstruther-Thomson, Lee formulated “her own version of ‘psychological aesthetics’ by connecting aesthetics to [such] bodily reactions [as] eye movements, pulse and heartbeat, [and] muscle tension,” as Colby explains (see Further Reading, Colby, p. 139). In doing so, Lee hoped to better account for individual experiences of art.

It was also during this time that the English ghost story saw a revival in its popularity in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Being fascinated with the pagan past, folklore, and medieval Christianity, Lee was ideally suited to writing in the genre and published most of her ghost stories between 1889 and 1902. Strictly speaking, however, Lee’s ghost stories are less concerned with spectral apparitions than with a more psychological form of haunting. Lee’s contributions to supernatural fiction are standout examples of the genre and continue to be read and enjoyed to this day.

However, Lee’s collaboration with Anstuther-Thomson put something of a strain on their relationship. “Temporary separations grew longer,” writes Colby, “until by 1909 these became permanent” (see Further Reading, Colby, p. 167).

In the midst of Lee’s relationship breakdown with Anstruther-Thomson, 1903 saw the publication of Lee’s novella Penelope Brandling: A Tale of the Welsh Coast in the Eighteenth Century. Like Ottilie before it, Lee chose a historical setting for her novella, and (again, like Ottilie) her enthusiasm for history, rather than her skill for fictional storytelling, has the upper hand. While she excelled as a writer of ghost stories, long-form fiction was not Lee’s strong suit as a writer.

In 1914, Lee made her annual visit to England but could not return to Italy after the outbreak of the First World War. As a pacifist, Lee found it difficult to publish during the war years, and her public dispute with H. G. Wells in journals The Nation and The Labour Leader led to the end of their friendship. She published just one book during the war: The Ballet of Nations (1915).

Upon the invitation of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), Lee produced a report on the war’s impact on British and European intellectuals. She closed her report, dated April 17, 1915, with an appeal to the Nobel committee to honor the writer and fellow pacifist Romain Rolland, to whom she had dedicated The Ballet of Nations, with the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he was awarded in 1916.

When the war ended in 1918, Lee returned to Italy. In 1920, she published the experimental, genre-bending Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy, which was favorably reviewed by Desmond McCarthy. Nonetheless, Lee’s publication output dwindled during the 1920s. In 1922, Italy fell to Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, but Lee chose to stay in her beloved Italy.

Lee’s last major published work was Music and Its Lovers, which was praised by Roger Fry in 1932. Three years after its publication, however, Lee passed away on February 13, 1935 in San Gervasio Bresciano, Italy, aged 78.

Vernon Lee was a remarkable and prolific writer, albeit somewhat undisciplined, and a fearless thinker. In recognition of her intellectual and literary achievements, Durham University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1924. Though her reputation suffered due to her pacifism, her work lives on, and her supernatural short stories, in particular, continue to be read and loved to this day.

Further Reading:

Colby, Vineta, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003).