Most literary reviews were positive, some comparing MC
to Charlotte Brontë
or George Eliot
; The Spectator called the novel brilliant and exhilarating.
Colby, Vineta. “’Devoted Amateur’: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage”. Essays in Criticism, Vol.
20
, No. 2, pp. 213-28.
214
An Edinburgh Review article written in 1900 praised Red Pottage in...
Literary responses
Mary Cholmondeley
None of these later novels achieved the success of Red Pottage. Critic Vineta Colby
writes that MC
's last novels invited the neglect they received from critics and public alike, because of their extreme...
Literary responses
Henrietta Camilla Jenkin
The Saturday Review called Once and Again a great advance upon any previous effort of the writer's.
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.
The young Vernon Lee
praised this novel enthusiastically in an Italian article published in La Rivista in October...
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...
Textual Features
Vernon Lee
Lee dedicated this work to her friend the German critic Karl Hillebrand
. Set at the close of the eighteenth century in a small German town, the story is told by a narrator who observes...
Textual Features
Vernon Lee
Vineta Colby
suggests that Lee's novel is not a specific attack on either Pre-Raphaelitism or Ruskin
's Christian aestheticism, but on the more general high art groups, which read hedonism into Pater
and vaunted the...
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.