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
Wealth and Poverty Ouida
She did not, however, have enough money. Oscar Wilde took it upon himself to organize a fundraising drive to discharge her unpaid bill at the Langham Hotel . As late as June, Vernon Lee reported...
Travel Mary Kingsley
During the 1880's each of MK 's two attempts to go away on holiday coincided with sudden relapses in her mother's condition. Within two days of her first holiday, a visit to Wales with...
Travel A. Mary F. Robinson
After a short visit to Paris during the summer of 1887, AMFR and Vernon Lee met up and went to Italy, where they stayed in Florence with Lee's family. This was probably their last time...
Travel A. Mary F. Robinson
AMFR and her friend Vernon Lee were in Sienna, to which they probably travelled from Florence.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
240
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Michael Field
Both Edith and Katharine contributed to this extraordinary journal, giving their impressions of travel, art, religion, death, and love. They also record encounters with their literary contemporaries, including Robert Browning , George Meredith , John Ruskin
Textual Production Amy Levy
AL had told Vernon Lee that she planned to write a novel in which Lee would be not the heroine, but the hero!
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
266
It is not clear whether or not this was an early...
Textual Production Laurence Alma-Tadema
LAT 's story The Captain's Bride was included in the collection The Witching Time: Tales for the Year's End, edited by Henry Norman and Austin Dobson and published at New York in 1887. Stories...
Textual Production Charlotte Perkins Gilman
CPG 's correspondence with Vernon Lee (on whom she was an important influence) survives among Lee's papers at Somerville College , Oxford.
Zorn, Christa. Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual. Ohio University Press.
182n9
Scharnhorst writes that her papers once in her daughter's hands were...
Textual Production Virginia Woolf
By 1912 VW had published on Margaret Cavendish (as Duchess of Newcastle), Ann, Lady Fanshawe , Elizabeth Carter , Anna Seward , Elizabeth, Lady Holland , Maria Edgeworth , Lady Hester Stanhope , theBrontë
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 Ethel Smyth
Major characters in the narrative included Vernon Lee and Henry Brewster .
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
6: 38n1
ES also wrote here, I am the most interesting person I know, and I don't care if no one else thinks...
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.
72-4
Her title comes from a manifesto...
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

Timeline

1895: Thomas Bird Mosher of Portland, Maine, began...

Writing climate item

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...

National or international item

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.

Texts

Lee, Vernon. “A Culture-Ghost”. Fraser’s Magazine, Vol.
103
, No. 23, pp. 1-29.
Lee, Vernon. Althea. Osgood and McIlvaine, 1894.
Lee, Vernon. Baldwin. T. Fisher Unwin, 1886.
Lee, Vernon, and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. Beauty and Ugliness. John Lane, 1912.
Lee, Vernon. Belcaro. W. Satchell, 1881.
Lee, Vernon. Euphorion. T. Fisher Unwin, 1884.
Lee, Vernon. Gospels of Anarchy. T. Fisher Unwin, 1908.
Lee, Vernon. Juvenilia. T. Fisher Unwin, 1887.
Lee, Vernon. “Les aventures d’une pièce de monnaie”. La Famille, No. 10; 12; 14.
Lee, Vernon. Miss Brown. Blackwood and Sons, 1884.
Lee, Vernon. Music and its Lovers. Editor Willis, Irene Cooper, G. Allen and Unwin, 1932.
Lee, Vernon. Ottilie. T. Fisher Unwin, 1883.
Lee, Vernon. Peace with Honour. Union of Democratic Control, 1915.
Lee, Vernon. “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”. The Yellow Book, Vol.
10
, pp. 289-44.
Lee, Vernon. Proteus. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner; E. P. Dutton, 1925.
Lee, Vernon. Renaissance Fancies and Studies. Smith, Elder, 1895.
Lee, Vernon. Satan the Waster. John Lane, 1920.
Lee, Vernon. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. W. Satchell, 1880.
Lee, Vernon, and Maxwell Armfield. The Ballet of the Nations. Chatto and Windus, 1915.
Lee, Vernon. The Countess of Albany. W. H. Allen, 1884.
Lee, Vernon. The Handling of Words. John Lane, 1923.
Lee, Vernon. The Poet’s Eye. Hogarth Press, 1926.
Birch, Sarah. The Prince of the Hundred Soups. Editor Lee, Vernon, T. Fisher Unwin, 1883.
Lee, Vernon. The Psychology of an Art Writer. David Zwimmer Books, 2018.
Lee, Vernon. “Tuscan Peasant Plays”. Fraser’s Magazine, Vol.
95
, No. 15, pp. 224-34.