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 Linda Villari
LV and her husband were both friends of Vernon Lee , accepting her hospitality and moving in the same circles.
Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935. Oxford University Press, 1964.
96
Lee corresponded with LV from the late 1870s to the early 1880s and discussed...
Friends, Associates William Morris
WM 's associates included George Bernard Shaw , Annie Besant , Emery Walker , Vernon Lee , as well as Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst . His friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti ended in 1875, as...
Friends, Associates Susan Tweedsmuir
ST 's parents made connections through friendship as remarkable as those made for them by family descent. Her mother was a friend of many writers and intellectuals of both sexes, including Marie Belloc Lowndes ,...
Friends, Associates Henry James
HJ 's circle of acquaintance in the world of letters and the theatre was very wide. As well as men of letters such as Edmund Gosse , it included a great many women writers, among...
Friends, Associates Mathilde Blind
One of her travelling companions (and a close friend) was the New Woman novelist Mona Caird (famous for her declaration calling the institution of marriage a vexatious failure in the Westminster Review in 1888).
qtd. in
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
38
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 A. Mary F. Robinson
Vernon Lee , likely in love with AMFR herself, suffered a breakdown when her friend's engagement to Darmesteter was announced, and after this she never fully regained her health. The two friends, however, remained in...
Friends, Associates Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
In Manchester HCJ became by 1854 a friend of Elizabeth Gaskell , who helped her with publishing business.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Editors Chapple, J. A. V. and Arthur Pollard, Harvard University Press, 1967.
286
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.
li
To the future writer Vernon Lee she acted as literary mentor. In July 1871 she...
Intertextuality and Influence Gladys Henrietta Schütze
As a child GHSimagined that a person, particularly a lady, would have to be something very unusual to produce real books.
Schütze, Gladys Henrietta. More Ha’pence Than Kicks. Jarrolds.
37-8
She was reassured by the ordinary appearance of Effie Adelaide Rowlands (pen-name...
Literary responses Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
The Saturday Review called Once and Again a great advance upon any previous effort of the writer's.
qtd. in
Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone, editors. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. J. B. Lippincott, 1891, 2 vols.
The young Vernon Lee praised this novel enthusiastically in an Italian article published in La Rivista in October...
Literary responses Jane Hume Clapperton
A review by Vernon Lee for The Academy was similarly positive, calling JHC 's book an important,valuable, and noble production, whose primary contribution was its originality: without being actually original in any separate...
Literary responses Julia Kavanagh
In the AthenæumH. F. Chorley agreed with Brontë, noting that many passages are written with Miss Kavanagh's usual sentiment and delicacy; but we can wish her no better wish than the earliest possible deliverance...
Literary responses Rosamund Marriott Watson
Vernon Lee had perceived something Athenaeumy in RMW 's writing several years before she appeared in its pages.
Demoor, Marysa. Their Fair Share. Ashgate, 2000.
124
Literary Setting A. Mary F. Robinson
The Red Clove, set in Italy, is dedicated to Vernon Lee ,, while Two Sisters, a memory of childhood, addresses Robinson's sister Mabel . Several poems draw heavily on the world of...
Occupation F. Mabel Robinson
FMR hoped to become a painter, and devoted most of [her] girlhood to painting
qtd. in
Bainton, George, editor. The Art of Authorship. J. Clarke, 1890.
326
before the full development of her interest in social and political issues. Vernon Lee in Miss Brown, 1884, somewhat...

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