Explore the vast range of titles available.

The year is 1881 and John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) has captured his close friend, the art historian and aesthetic critic Vernon Lee (1856–1935) on canvas. Sargent’s bravura brushstroke conveys Lee’s keen intelligence and sharp wit, with inquisitive eyes peering through her gleaming spectacles. Reinforcing her agency to look, as a woman and as a woman art historian, Sargent’s portrait conveys Lee’s status as an authoritative cultural mediator who, as Hilary Fraser has observed, ‘decisively usurped the gaze’ through the medium of writing.

This essay proposes that we understand Vernon Lee’s debut novel, Miss Brown (1884), as enacting a theory of literary language’s constructive potency that Lee develops in her critical essays. Those critical essays offer a vibrant nineteenth-century formalism, suggesting how fiction constructs and formalizes our realities, shaping readers’ mental and emotional circuits as it arranges phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. In Miss Brown, Lee crafts a prose style that meticulously tracks the protagonist’s formation—the “little dramas of expectation, fulfilment and disappointment, … of tensions and relaxations”—rendering that formation as a drama of sentence-level structuration. The resulting “representation” of Anne Brown is interrupted with adjective-rich stretches conspicuously geared toward defining, formulating, and theorizing what is being represented, essay-like. By treating the protagonist as an occasion to foreground syntax’s active building and abstracting, Miss Brown’s prose partakes in the kind of literary practice that has recently been described as nonmimetic realism—realism that does more than denote and refer and reflect what is, and instead performs, meditating on form’s process, to project and inform new potentialities.

Vernon Lee was proficient in four languages, yet little attention has been given to her non-English literary networks and publications. This article draws on peritexts, periodical reviews, and correspondence to address that gap and to connect Lee’s multilingualism with her more studied queerness. Focusing on key moments in Lee’s early career, I argue that Lee’s pivots between national literary fields were both materially and affectively motivated, not simply disinterested strategies to maximize cultural capital. I present “queer relations” as one rubric for exploring Lee’s crisscrossed emotional entanglements with lovers, female mediators, and languages themselves. These reconstructions open up new readings of Lee’s fictions, showcase the payoffs of combining queer theory with translation history, and suggest the need for more multilingual work in Victorian studies.

In May 2019 an international cooperative of researchers, performers, and artists staged Vernon Lee’s (Violet Paget, 1856–1935) pacifist drama The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915) at her Villa Il Palmerino, Florence. The site-specific performance was adapted from Lee’s text by director Angeliki Papoulia and producer Federica Parretti, with a focus on the text’s resonances with the current resurgence of the nationalist far-right movements and anti-immigrant manifestos. This article considers the genesis of this production, the research informing its adaptation, and the subsequent performance of the piece.

The aestheticism of Walter Pater and Vernon Lee participated in a late-nineteenth-century discourse devoted to exploring the aesthetic's role in producing and sustaining, as well as undermining, notions of racial difference. Pater's “A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew” (1876) and Lee's “Dionea” (1890) partake of Immanuel Kant's understanding of race as a matter of aesthetic perception, yet call into question his attempt to maintain distinct and essential racial categories. By affirming the universality of anti-rationalistic Dionysian experiences, Pater and Lee interrogate the racial logic of Kantian aesthetics on primarily aestheticist grounds, as part of their commitment to dismantling rationalistic intellectual frameworks that place unnecessary limits upon our perceptions of the world and of each other.

In his 1920 review of Vernon Lee’s avant-garde pacifist allegory Satan, the Waster: A Philosophical Trilogy, George Bernard Shaw salutes the author as a representative of ‘the old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan intellectualism’. Shaw’s formulation reflects the fact that he is writing after the watershed (and bloodshed) of World War I had rendered cosmopolitanism a contested concept. He looks back nostalgically to a cultural moment when the idea of transnational European cooperation seemed both right-thinking and realizable, a moment that he identifies with the figure of Vernon Lee (1856–1935). A century on, as we face another watershed in Anglo-European relations, it seems timely to revisit that cosmopolitan ideal, at once old guard and avant-garde, and how it inflected Victorian cultural history. This article will take a particular aspect of Lee’s protean oeuvre — her contribution to the historiography of art — as a starting point for reflecting on the cosmopolitan mobility of nineteenth-century female art historians, and how their unsettling subversion of national cultural boundaries was a shaping factor in the evolving identity of British art and art history as produced in Great Britain. It will consider in particular the transnational contribution of the late-Victorian historian of French art, Emilia Dilke (1840–1904), alongside Lee’s own books on Renaissance Italy.

The gallery space is full of static objects but also of movement. This is the space Vernon Lee sought to understand, theorizing and experimenting about how art moves. Lee is enlisted here to help look at movement in one of Walter Sickert’s music-hall paintings.

The article is a reflection on the category of the beautiful in the work of Professor Hilary Fraser in the context of Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College.

The gallery space is full of static objects but also of movement. This is the space Vernon Lee sought to understand, theorizing and experimenting about how art moves. Lee is enlisted here to help look at movement in one of Walter Sickert's music-hall paintings.

This article examines the establishment of women’s voice and an alternative women’s history in the ghost stories by late nineteenth-century Chinese writer Wang Tao and British writer Vernon Lee. Situating ghost stories as a Gothic mode that offers the marginalized groups, especially women, the opportunity to re-inscribe their voice and subjectivity into a fictional history through the motif of the returning ghost, this cross-cultural analysis proceeds to investigate the possible manipulation and mediation of that gendered voice in the history-making of ghost stories. Continuing the tradition of Chinese zhiguai (namely “the records of the strange”) to fashion an unofficial history of the ghost against the official history of the state, Wang’s two stories of victimized female ghosts centralize the obliterated women’s narration of their own history yet veil the mediation involved in the male historian’s history-making. Reading Lee’s ghost story “Amour Dure” as a meta-critique of the kind of history-making through ghost-making exemplified in Wang’s tales, the article argues that the haunting liminality of the ghost in Gothic ghost stories may offer a better strategy for the marginalized group to re-inscribe their presence into reality than a polarization between official and unofficial histories.