Vineta Colby
comments that here and in its predecessor, Both novels are dressed and furnished in meticulous detail. The cold statistics of the parliament
ary Blue Books are bedecked in sables and lace.
Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. New York University Press.
156-7
Textual Features
Mary Augusta Ward
The novel describes how the empty widowhood of the eponymous character has been saved by books generating that inner sweetness, that gentle restoring flame that comes from the life of ideas, the life of knowledge...
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...
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
The work has been consistently admired. On its appearance the editor of The Spectator praised it for wonderful mastery of the borderland of the natural and the supernatural,
Greenfield, John R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 159. Gale Research.
In 1878, ELL
wrote to a relative, True success comes only by hard work, great courage in self-correction, and the most earnest and intense determination to succeed, not thinking that every endeavour is already success...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Lee's publication was panned in the Times Literary Supplement, but found strong support from Desmond MacCarthy
, writing as Affable Hawk in the New Statesman, and from G. B. Shaw
in the Nation...
Reception
Vernon Lee
Interest in her work was waning by 1937 when some of her letters were first privately printed (though Mary Agnes Hamilton
in Remembering My Good Friends, 1944, noted her extreme subtlety and acuteness of...
Author summary
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...
VL
spent her childhood migrating with her family, mainly on her mother's family funds, through Germany, Italy, France, and Switzerland. In The Sentimental Traveller, VL
comments that We shifted our...
Cultural formation
Vernon Lee
As early as 24 August 1887 VL
was calling Kit her new love, or new life (adapting the title of a poem which had been written for Lee by Amy Levy
).
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
148
The two...
Cultural formation
Vernon Lee
In her biography of Lee, Vineta Colby
repeats longstanding judgments about the author's sexuality by emphasizing that she made no effort to conceal her attachments to women,
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press.
335
but was hesitant about—even repelled by—sexual intimacy...
politics
Vernon Lee
Vineta Colby
describes VL
's politics as liberal with socialist leanings.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press.
272
Lee disagreed with the Liberal government's refusal to grant women the vote: she supported suffrage but disapproved of militancy.
Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935. Oxford University Press.
202
Her views on...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Lee's work had a highly mixed reception. It was praised by Pater: in a footnote added to the third edition of his Renaissance, he calls Euphoriona work abounding in knowledge and insights on...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Shortly after the publication of this book she sent a copy to Robert Browning
, assuming he would appreciate the admiration she expresses for his poetry (The Ring and the Book). In June...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Colby, Vineta. “’Devoted Amateur’: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage”. Essays in Criticism, Vol.
20
, No. 2, pp. 213-28.
Colby, Vineta, and Robert Alan Colby. The Equivocal Virtue. Archon Books, 1966.
Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. New York University Press, 1970.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Colby, Vineta. Yesterday’s Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel. Princeton University Press, 1974.