Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Vernon Lee
-
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
.
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).
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research.
38
Friends, Associates
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
During these last years many friends, both from Edinburgh and from earlier times in HCJ
's life, remained faithful visitors or letter-writers: these included members of the Constable
publishing family, John Ruffini
, and Vernon Lee
.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, and Fleeming Jenkin. “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin”. Papers, Literary, Scientific, &c., edited by Sir Sidney Colvin et al., Longmans, Green, p. 1: xi - clxx.
JEC
's friends in London included the scholar Richard Garnett
(superintendent of the British Museum
reading room and future father-in-law of another translator, Constance Garnett
). They met in 1877 or 1878, and Richard Garnett...
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
There she met and became a friend of Violet Paget
, who was then newly published under the pseudonym Vernon Lee. By the early 1890s, FPC
had become friendly with another late Victorian writer: Katharine Bradley
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...