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
.
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!
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 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...
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
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.
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...
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
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.
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...
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...
