Vernon Lee 1856 – 1935
born Violet Paget
Writer, art historian.
14 October 1856 – 13 February 1935
Vernon Lee in Bloomsbury – A Tribute by Louise Wenman-James
Vernon Lee was an essayist, a short story writer, a novelist, a travel writer, an art historian and an aesthetic critic. She published prolifically, and her vast use of different genres and mediums demonstrates her intellect and her intense curiosity of the world around her. Lee was well travelled and she found herself in Bloomsbury on more than one occasion as she visited friends and the British Museum. Her relationship with Bloomsbury was complex. Born in 1856 at Château St Léonard, near Boulogne, France, Lee was part of a family who have been described by contemporary researchers as ‘bourgeois gypsies’ (Colby, 2003, p. 6). This oxymoron epitomises the contradiction between a rapidly moving and unsettled lifestyle and the relaxed nature of the serene and beautiful places in which Lee spent her childhood. Lee found Bloomsbury to be a stark difference from more peaceful European spaces.
Lee was born ‘Violet Paget’, and she was the only child of Matilda (1815-1896) and Henry Ferguson Paget (1820-1896). Matilda also had a son from a previous marriage, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, who was a key propagator in Lee’s unusual education and upbringing. Lee’s 1908 collection of travel writings The Sentimental Traveller: Notes on Places tells us of her ‘childhood of romantic roamings’ (p. 3) as her family ‘shifted [their] quarters invariably every six months, and, by dint of shifting, crossed Europe’s length and breadth in several directions’ (p. 3). Eugene’s education prepared him for Oxford but, as Lee’s literary biographer Vinita Colby notes, Lee’s early education was far more ‘haphazard’ as she learned from European governesses and her mother’s childhood instruction books (p. 6). Eugene wrote frequently to his sister regarding her studies and provided a somewhat guided curriculum for Matilda to follow as they travelled. Lee began writing as a child, and her creativity was inspired by European governesses who read with her, and artistic acquaintances encountered across the continent, such as the family of artist John Singer Sargent.
Lee’s relationship with Bloomsbury started to become significant in 1881. She had visited before, notably in 1874 when she attended a working women’s college with a lecturer ‘Miss F’. Alex Murray believes this to be Frances Martin (2020), who had established her own Working Women’s College in Bloomsbury in Queen’s Square, less than a mile away from Gower Street where Lee would come to stay in the 1880s. In 1874, Lee was just eighteen years old and her visit to the college demonstrates an early interest in women’s education and self-development. The following year Lee published under her androgynous pseudonym for the first time. The name ‘Vernon Lee’ disassociated her writing from her more feminine given name ‘Violet’, although she would use both names interchangeably throughout her life. She borrowed ‘Lee’ from her brother’s name, and her new authorial pseudonym had ‘the advantage of leaving undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’ (Lee, 1875, p. 189). Lee’s preference for androgyny went beyond her publications; she tended to assume a more “masculine” appearance in her attire, and images of her exemplify her resistance against a more stereotypical femininity.
Lee was known to have a strong personality and to have a particularly argumentative nature. The circumstances under which Lee arrived at 84 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, demonstrate that, although Lee could be confrontational, she did not struggle to foster close friendships and intimate relationships. In 1880 Lee met A. Mary F. Robinson in Florence. Scholarship generally avoids defining the nature of the relationship between Lee and Robinson but their correspondence suggests an element of physicality and closeness. In the summer of 1881, Lee arrived at Mary’s family home in Bloomsbury to stay with the Robinsons. She immediately felt a connection with the place. Writing home to her mother in Italy, she stated she was ‘agreeably surprised’ with ‘everything’. 84 Gower Street was ‘the most charming house’ she had ever seen, ‘full of all sorts of pretty things and picturesque furniture’ (p. 288). Throughout the summer, she made many connections in literary and artistic London society, and figures such as Walter Pater, Humphry Ward and his wife Mary Augusta (Mrs Humphry) Ward, Edmund Gosse amongst others gathered in Bloomsbury at the Robinson’s home. Laurel Brake suggests that Lee’s friendship with Pater, fostered within the literary salons of the Robinson’s Bloomsbury home, ‘eased Pater’s passage into the wider circle’ of literary London (2006, p. 42).
It would not be presumptuous to assume that Lee’s ambiguous relationship with Bloomsbury was very much influenced by the people she spent time with there. She wrote that she had ‘seen a great deal of literary folk, catalogued & uncatalogued’ at Gower Street but noted that she was ‘not at all impressed as [she] should be’. It could be suggested that a significant factor in Lee’s early admiration for Bloomsbury was Mary’s presence. In July 1881 Lee visited Oxford, writing back to her mother afterwards that ‘these sedgy, waterlilied rivers seem to me the one thing for which I might regret England, besides the dear old black Bloomsbury, besides Mary Robinson’ (p. 313). This is not the only time Lee refers to Bloomsbury as ‘black’. In a previous letter to Matilda, Lee wrote that she likes ‘London extremely, this part of it at least […] I like this black part best, it has a look of its own’ (p. 288). Despite this positivity, later on in 1881, she describes it as ‘characterless’ with ‘black squares, with the green leaves so much greener than natural against the sooty branches’ (p. 299). This blackness gives some insight into how Lee saw London’s Bloomsbury streets compared with the lush natural landscapes and provincial towns she would have been familiar with across Europe. Throughout these 1881 letters, Lee regards Bloomsbury with fondness, despite the dark environment she constructs when writing to her mother.
In 1882, Lee’s perspective towards Bloomsbury became more negative. As in 1881, she stayed at the Robinson’s home in Gower Street. However, a disagreement in July over an invitation to a Royal Academy reception resulted in Mary’s father claiming that Lee had ruined the family peace, accusing her of excluding Mary’s younger sister Mabel from engagements, and causing Mary to become disagreeable. Lee wrote to Matilda, ‘Mary, darling, acted very well, with perfect respect towards her mother, but with perfect firmness in asking for reparation & determining to stick by me. Indeed I love her more than ever, & feel more than ever that we couldn’t give each other up. Of course all my connexion with Gower Street as such is over’ (p. 381). They retreated to Sussex, and Lee expresses relief, telling her mother that ‘all that little literary society which seems, in pre-Raphaelite days, to have met at 84 Gower Street, seems dispersed or melted away, & 84 is getting more & more common place & languid. To me it had grown excessively tedious’ (p. 383). The following year, Lee returned to Bloomsbury to visit the British Museum, writing how she was ‘quite appalled to think I had ever lived in the grime and choking air of Bloomsbury. I am sure I shall keep better in health here’ in her new London lodgings in Pembroke Square (p. 425). As the summer progressed, Lee wrote of her growing disgust for London; ‘Even here, which is many degrees better than Bloomsbury, it is unendurable[,] hot & squalid, & with a pervading smell of yellow brown wet brown paper and fishmongers’ (p. 427). Although Lee made peace with the Robinsons, her ongoing criticism of Bloomsbury contrasts with the fondness she portrayed before the disagreement, suggesting an irreparable rift. The Robinsons moved away from Bloomsbury in 1883 and continued a successful literary salon in Kensington.
Lee’s time in Bloomsbury had a lasting impact on her career as a writer. In the winter of 1881, after spending the summer months at Gower Street, Lee published her text Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, dedicated to Mary Robinson. Belcaro includes self-reflections, and Lee crafts her authorial identity within the essays as she portrays herself as transitioning from a historian to an aesthetic critic. Her self-awareness, and her desire to construct herself in this way, is somewhat unsurprising, having spent much time that year embedded within an entire community of artists and writers while she would have been preparing the text for publication. Meeting Pater in these circles also had a profound impact; as Patricia Pulham observes in her biography of Lee, ‘The impact of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) on Lee’s work is evident in Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance (1884), of which he is the dedicatee, and in Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), which includes her valedictory to him’ (2018). Furthermore, after retreating from Gower Street in July 1882, Lee began writing her only novel Miss Brown (1884). Miss Brown satirises the aesthetic movement and targets Pater amongst other artists who may have been inspired by his work, exploring the innate selfishness and superficiality of the aesthetic movement. The relationships she built with aesthetes in Bloomsbury no doubt inspired this novel.
After leaving Bloomsbury, Lee spent time researching and reading on art, culture and music (Gagel, 2017, p. xxxiii). Later, in 1887, her relationship with Mary Robinson ended when Mary became engaged to James Darmesteter. As Patricia Pulham and Catherine Maxwell note, Lee was emotionally devastated and ‘succumbed to a severe nervous breakdown’ (2006, p. 4). Soon after Mary’s engagement, Lee met Clementina (Kit) Anstruther-Thomson. Like Mary, Kit inspired Lee’s creativity, and they collaborated together on Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics in 1912.
Later in life, Lee would return to Bloomsbury many times to visit friends such as Amy Levy, Christina Rossetti, Wilfrid Ward and Josephine Mary Ward. Around the First World War, Lee associated with pacifists in Bloomsbury and Soho. Bloomsbury remained a consistent space for literary networks and intellectual growth. Despite many connections, London was never Lee’s home. She died in Italy in 1935, at her family home Il Palmerino. Lee continued writing throughout her final years, although this took the form of unpublished notes rather than the essays for which she had become known.
These short reflections provide a brief insight into Lee’s huge writing oeuvre and, of course, Bloomsbury circles were just a small influence on her work. Lee pursued her literary career with vigour and determination and, while I have focused on how Bloomsbury influenced her writing, it is inevitable that her presence in these circles would have inspired others around her. Lee was one of the most prolific female writers of the late nineteenth century and her ability to master so many different modes and genres, ensures that her work remains captivating to scholars and readers today.
Louise Wenman-James researches women who published in the 1890s periodical The Yellow Book. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Surrey, and her doctoral thesis looks specifically at how gendered identities are constructed in the work of Olive Custance, Ella D’Arcy, Vernon Lee and Ada Leverson. In 2022 she spoke on Vernon Lee’s decadent landscapes in travel writing at the British Association of Decadence studies conference. She has contributed to the Yellow Nineties 2.0 project with her short biography of Ada Leverson.
Sources Cited
Brake, L. (2006). ‘Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle’. In Pulham, P. and Maxwell, C. (eds). Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 40-57.
Colby, V. (2003). Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Gagel, A. (2017). ‘Historical Note for Volume I: 1865-1884’. Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. xxxi-xxxiv.
Lee, V. (1875). Letter to Jenkin, H. Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College. April 6th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 189-190. 2017.
Lee, V. (1881). Belcaro; Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions. Reprint. London: T Fisher Unwin. 1887.
Lee, V. (1881). Letter to Paget, M. Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College. June 16th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 288-290. 2017.
Lee, V. (1881). Letter to Vallari, Linda. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. June 27th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 298-9. 2017.
Lee, V. (1882). Letter to Paget, M. Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College. July 13th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 376-7. 2017.
Lee, V. (1882). Letter to Paget, M. Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College. July 20th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 379-381.
Lee, V. (1882). Letter to Paget, M. Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College. July 22nd. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 382-4. 2017.
Lee, V. (1883). Letter to Paget, M. Vernon Lee Archive, Miller Library, Colby College. June 29th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. 2017. Pp. 425-6. 2017.
Lee, V. (1883). Letter to Paget, M. Vernon Lee Archive: Miller Library, Colby College. June 30th. Reprint. In Gagel, A. (ed). Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856-1935. Vol. 1. Routledge: London. Pp. 427-8. 2017.
Lee, V. (1884). Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Lee, V. (1884). Miss Brown. London: William Blackwood and Sons.
Lee, V. (1895). Renaissance Fancies and Studies. London: Smith, Elder.
Lee, V. (1908). The Sentimental Traveller: Notes on Places. London: John Lane.
Lee, V. and Anstruther-Thomson, C. (1912). Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics. London: John Lane.
Murray, A. (2020). ‘“Through variously tinted cosmopolitan glasses”: Vernon Lee’s travel writing of the British Isles’. Studies in Travel Writing. 23(4). Pp. 342-357.
Pater, W. (1873). Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Reprint. Ebook. Available at: http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts/texts/Pater/Works/ren_1873.pdf. (Accessed: 01/12/2022).
Pulham, P. (2018). ‘Vernon Lee’. Yellow Nineties 2.0. Available at: https://1890s.ca/lee_bio/. (Accessed: 9/7/2022).
Pulham, P. and Maxwell, C. (2006). Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Recommended Starting Points for Exploring Vernon Lee’s Writing
For short stories
Lee, V. (1890). Hauntings and other Fantastic Tales. Reprint. Plymouth: Broadview Editions. 2006.
Lee, V. (1896). ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’. The Yellow Book. Vol 10. London: John Lane. Pp. 289-344.
For travel writing
Lee, V. (1905). The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays on the Genius of Places. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head.
For essays
Lee, V. (1902). ‘The Economic Dependence of Women’. The North American Review. 175(548). Pp. 71-90.
Lee, V. (1913). The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recommended Further Reading
Blackburn-Daniels, S. (2018). ‘The scholar’s copy book’ and the ‘blotting-book mind’ : stratigraphic approaches to interdisciplinary reading and writing in the work of Vernon Lee. PhD thesis. University of Liverpool. Available at: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.771145. (Accessed: 16/03/2023).
Blackburn-Daniels, S. (2020). ‘‘Struggling with the tempter’: the Queer Archival Spaces of Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson, and Amy Levy’. Volupté. 3(1). Pp. 92-110.
Dellamora, R. (2004). ‘Productive Decadence: “The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought”: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde’. New Literary History. 35(4). Pp. 529-546.
Kandola, S. (2010). Vernon Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Murphy, G. (2010). ‘Publishing Scoundrels: Henry James, Vernon Lee, and “Lady Tal”. The Henry James Review. 31(3). Pp. 280-287.
Pulham, P. (2008). Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales. London: Routledge.
Pulham, P. and Blackburn-Daniels, S. (2022). Vernon Lee – Volupte. 5(2). Available at: https://volupte.gold.ac.uk/current-issue. (Accessed: 20/03/2023).
Zorn, C. (2003). Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Amy Levy: To Vernon Lee
On Bellosguardo, when the year was young,
We wandered, seeking for the daffodil
And dark anemone, whose purples fill
The peasant’s plot, between the corn-shoots sprung.
Over the grey, low wall the olive flung
Her deeper greyness ; far off, hill on hill
Sloped to the sky, which, pearly-pale and still,
Above the large and luminous landscape hung.
A snowy blackthorn flowered beyond my reach;
You broke a branch and gave it to me there;
I found for you a scarlet blossom rare.
Thereby ran on of Art and Life our speech;
And of the gifts the gods had given to each—
Hope unto you, and unto me Despair.