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
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 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!
qtd. in
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
266
It is not clear whether or not this was an early...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Lady Ottoline Morrell
Another source of her aesthetic tastes was her acquaintance with writer and critic Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), who also encouraged the appreciation of eighteenth-century Italian design.
Seymour, Miranda. Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
53-4
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...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Walter Pater
From his time at BrasenoseWP knew Oscar Browning . In Oxford and London he socialized with Edmund Gosse , Algernon Charles Swinburne , Simeon Solomon , Oscar Wilde , Vernon Lee , A. Mary F. Robinson
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...
Friends, Associates F. Mabel Robinson
FMR shared to the full the social involvement of her family with entertaining leading figures in London cultural life: such men as John Singer Sargent , Robert Browning , William Morris , and Oscar Wilde
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...
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...
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...
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

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