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
Cultural formation Mathilde Blind
Nothing is known of MB 's sexuality, but the homosociality of some of her love poetry and her connection to Vernon Lee 's circle is suggestive.
Dedications A. Mary F. Robinson
Several of these poems are addressed to her friend Vernon Lee .
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell, 1995.
538
Dedications A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR published a book of criticism on French literature, The French Procession, A Pageant of Great Writers, with a dedication to Vernon Lee .
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
240
Family and Intimate relationships A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR had met the poet Vernon Lee by 1878 (a little earlier than is often supposed), the year she turned twenty-one, since her first publication includes poems addressed to Lee. They became close friends and...
Family and Intimate relationships Amy Levy
AL addressed letters and love-poems to the writer Vernon Lee , whom she had met that spring in Florence, and for whom she cherished an unrequited love.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
254-5, 119-21
Family and Intimate relationships A. Mary F. Robinson
By 22 July 1882 AMFR and Vernon Lee were staying for a holiday at a rented cottage in Sussex.
Zorn, Christa. Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual. Ohio University Press, 2003.
8
Reportedly, Lee whisked her friend away from London because she felt that the literary...
Family and Intimate relationships Mathilde Blind
MB also had a half-brother from her mother's second marriage, Rudolph Blind , who was an artist. Vernon Lee pronounced him an awful little snob.
Demoor, Marysa. “Women Poets as Critics in the Athenæum: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, No. 1, pp. 51 -71.
53, 69n11
Family and Intimate relationships A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR married James Darmesteter after a brief courtship; it was said that she had proposed to him, in August 1887, shortly after their first meeting at the British Museum .
Sources disagree on the date...
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 A. Mary F. Robinson
In June 1881 Vernon Lee stayed with AMFR 's family in London. The next month the friends visited Oxford with Mary's sister Mabel . Their Oxford social life included attending a dinner party hosted by...
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 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 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 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 Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Her travels enabled her to meet [w]omen from all over the world, fine women, thoughtful progressive women!
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. An Autobiography. Lane, Ann J.Editor , University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
301
They included Jane Addams , Mona Caird , Marie Stritt (who translated Women and Economics into German),...

Timeline

1895
Thomas Bird Mosher of Portland, Maine, began publishing The Bibelot. A Reprint of Poetry & Prose for Book Lovers, a monthly series later collected as an annual volume, of exquisitely produced editions in tiny press-runs.
5 March 1946
Winston Churchill made a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he described an iron curtain coming down across Europe, dividing the east from the west.