Abstract
Vernon Lee’s debut into aestheticism takes place in the shadow of Pater’s discipleship. Her second collection of essays, Belcaro (1881), adopts the language and method of Pater’s early writings in order to launch an attack against the use of didacticism and ethical principles in art criticism. Lee was only 25 but she had already made her name known, the previous year, as the author of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880). At the time of the publication of Belcaro she was paying her first adult visit to England, having been born and brought up in Continental Europe; but her knowledge of English aestheticism was nothing but up-to-date and sharp. Equally sharp was her determination to make a strong contribution to it.
… if, in such a moment of doubt, we ask ourselves, overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? we shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least.
Vernon Lee, ‘The Child in the Vatican’ (1881)
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Notes
The Chiaramonti Niobid in the Vatican represents one of Niobe’s daughters; the Dying Boy of the Munich Glyptothek is reputed to be one of Niobe’s sons; the famous Niobe Group of the Uffizi is the closest we have to a fully preserved group. These statues, which depict the same theme but date from different periods and were not part of a single original group, are the objects of ongoing reconstructions and debate among archaeologists and art historians. For recent scholarship on the Uffizi Group see Richard Brilliant, ‘Marmi Classici, Storie Tragiche’ in Commentaries on Roman Art: Selected Studies (London: Pindar Press, 1994), 121–47;
also see the detailed Wilfred A. Geominy Die Florentiner Niobiden, 2 vols (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 1984).
For an example of nineteenth-century scholarship on the Niobe myth in art and literature, with which Lee might well have been acquainted, see K. B. Stark, Niobe und die Niobiden (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1863).
On the passage from classical art, via Hegel, to late-Victorian aestheticism, see also Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 159.
Cf. Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’: ‘we see the hairy, tawny bodies at play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum’ (p. 42). On the museum as ‘mortuary’ see the evocative Jonah Siegel, Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 3–10.
See Colby, Vernon Lee, p. 6; and Christa Zorn, Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), pp. 3 and 6.
Women could at this point take part in a university education but were by and large not admitted to degrees — a process that took place slowly over the next few decades. London was the first British university to admit women to its degrees in 1878, but by then they had already been regular attendants at lectures for several years both in London and other urban universities such as Bristol and Birmingham. In Cambridge, Girton College was founded in 1869 and Newnham in 1871. In Oxford, Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall were the first female ‘halls’ to open in 1879. See Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995);
Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (London and Toronto: George G. Harrap and Co., 1960); and Hurst, Victorian Women Writers, esp. pp. 94–9.
On Lee’s conflicting identity within the male intellectual milieu, see Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham, ‘Introduction’ to Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics, eds Maxwell and Pulham (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–20, esp. pp. 6–9; and Stefano Evangelista, ‘Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism’, in ibid., 91–111, in which some of the material in this chapter has appeared in an earlier form.
Hilary Fraser, ‘Interstitial Identities: Vernon Lee and the Spaces In-Between’, in Marketing the Author: Authorial Personae, Narrative Selves and Self-Fashioning, 1880–1930, ed. Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 114–33, esp. p. 118.
Lee, Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884).
Symonds to Lee, 28 March 1882. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, eds Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, 3 vols (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967–69), vol. 2, p. 740.
Lee’s letter to Mrs Jenkin, 18 December 1878. Lee, Letters, p. 59. On the ‘tensions and contradictions’ of the term ‘female aesthete’ see Linda Hughes, ‘A Female Aesthete at the Helm: Sylvia’s Journal and “Graham R. Tomson,” 1893–1894’, Victorian Periodicals Review 29:2 (1996), 173–92, pp. 173–4;
quoted in Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 4.
Berenson accused Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson of basing their essays ‘Beauty and Ugliness’ (Contemporary Review, 1897) on ideas that he had expressed to them in private. Symonds’s accusations were privately formulated in letters to the American educator T. S. Perry: writing on 15 July 1883 he claimed that Lee had ‘pitchfork[ed]’ the topic of the Carmina Burana from him and, on 30 July 1884, he declared himself ‘sore at her bagging the metaphor of her book [Euphorion] from me, & for wholesale reproductions of my opinions’. Symonds, Letters, vol. 2, resp. pp. 833 and 935. For an analysis of the Berenson case, see Alison Brown, ‘Vernon Lee and the Renaissance: From Burckhardt to Berenson’, in Victorian and Edwardian Responses, eds Law and Østermark-Johansen, 185–209. For the use of quotation for the creation of aesthetic networks, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Walter Pater and Aesthetic Painting’, in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 36–58.
Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes;
Kathy Alexis Psomiades and Talia Schaffer, eds, Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999).
Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry fames, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990);
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986).
In the early 1880s, Lee had formed a strong emotional attachment to Robinson, to whom she dedicated Belcaro. Robinson dedicated both her collection of poems, The Crowned Hippolytus (1881), and her historical study, The End of the Middle Ages (1889), to Symonds, her ‘Friend’ and ‘dear Master’. For an incisive analysis of Robinson’s complex intellectual debt to Symonds, see Yopie Prins, ‘“Lady’s Greek” (With the Accents): A Metrical Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson’, Victorian Literature and Culture 34:2 (2006), 591–618.
For Symonds’s sexual attraction to Robinson, see Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1964), p. 223. In this context Grosskurth also notes that Havelock Ellis proposed to use Lee and Robinson as a ‘possible case-history for the section on Lesbianism in Sexual Inversion’. The two women became estranged after Robinson’s sudden engagement to James Darmesteter in 1887, which Lee opposed on overtly eugenicist grounds.
Anne Brown can be identified with Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, and Walter Hamlin, the male protagonist, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Hamlin’s first name and his description as ‘gemlike’ in the opening of the novel suggest that Lee might have wanted to give him some elements of Pater. Hamlin’s predatory heterosexuality should discourage readers from taking this association too far. For a detailed identification of the characters in Miss Brown see Leonee Ormond, ‘Vernon Lee as a Critic of Aestheticism in Miss Brown’, Colby Library Quarterly 9:3 (1970), 131–54.
Lee, Miss Brown, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1884), vol. 1, p. 176.
Psomiades, Beauty’s Body, p. 171 ff.; see also Psomiades, ‘“Still Burning from This Strangling Embrace”: Vernon Lee on Desire and Aesthetics’, in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 21–41.
For another reading of Miss Brown as a lesbian novel see Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 154–7.
For a comparative analysis of the treatment of the Renaissance in Lee, Pater, and Symonds, see Hilary Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992), esp. pp. 225–56.
Lee, Juvenilia: Being a Second Series of Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions, 2 vols (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887), vol. 1, p. 8.
Pater, ‘Vernon Lee’s “Juvenilia”’, Pall Mall Gazette 5 (August 1887), p. 5. See also Mario Praz, who talks of an ‘insistent negation of the possession of beauty’ in Lee’s writings and identifies in them a ‘Calvinist stoicism revived through the contact with the socialist currents of the fin de siècle.’ He adds that ‘Vernon Lee is an aesthete who is ashamed of her leisure.’
Praz, ‘Vernon Lee’, Il Patto col Serpente (Milan: Mondadori, 1972), 270–85, resp. pp. 283 and 284, my translation.
See also Vineta Colby’s influential ‘The Puritan Aesthete: Vernon Lee’, in The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, and London: University of London Press, 1970), 235–304.
A. Mary F. Robinson, The Crowned Hippolytus, Translated from Euripides with New Poems (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1881). For Robinson’s Hellenism and her experiments with gender see Prins, ‘“Lady’s Greek” (With the Accents)’.
See Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 72.
See Stephen L. Dyson, Eugénie Sellers Strong: Portrait of an Archaeologist (London: Duckworth, 2004), pp. 41–5.
Jane E. Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. vi.
Jane E. Harrison, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature (London: Rivingtons, 1882), p. 88.
On the influence of Harrison and the myth and ritual school on modernist writing see, lor example, M. C. Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998);
Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
J. B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). On the repressed influence of Lee and aestheticism on the modernists see Dennis Denisoll, ‘The Forest Beyond the Frame: Picturing Women’s Desires in Vernon Lee and Virginia Woolf’, in Women and British Aestheticism, eds Psomiades and Schaller, 251–69.
For a lull account see Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 87–94. Beard’s reconstruction of the Lee-Harrison-Sellers triangle is captivating, although her locus on the two professional classicists tends to sacrifice the complexities of Lee’s intellectual and erotic involvement (the ‘queen of the Parisian Left Bank’, p. 88; ‘the most famous lesbian in town’, p. 94).
Lee, Renaissance Fancies and Studies (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1895), p. ix.
In her recent book on Lee, Patricia Pulham offers a different, engaging reading of the role of the child in Lee’s writings based on Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory of the ‘transitional object’. Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Lee, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (London: Heinemann, 1890), p. ix.
Angela Leighton, ‘Ghosts, Aestheticism, and “Vernon Lee”’, Victorian Literature and Culture 28:1 (2000), 1–14, p. 2.
On the continuities between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and Lee’s Hauntings see Catherine Maxwell, ‘From Dionysus to “Dionea”: Vernon Lee’s Portraits’, Word and Image 13:3 (1997), 253–69.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Art and Literature, The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1985), 336–76, p. 358.
Symonds, Italian Byways (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1883), p. 16.
Waldstein, Essays on the Art of Pheidias (Cambridge: University Press, 1885), resp. pp. 68 and 405.
On the persistent textual connection between lesbianism and spectrality, see Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1875), pp. 23–4. Pater quotes this anecdote approvingly in his review of the book in The Academy 169 (31 July 1875), 105–6.
Lee had already detected more than 10 years earlier that this sentence contained a nudge to the contemporary homoerotically oriented readership. In a review of Symonds’s Shakespeare’s Predecessors in English Drama (1884) she provocatively remarks on Symonds’s tendency to see amour de l’impossible as ‘the universal constituent’ of Marlowe’s characters, adding somewhat tartly that ‘[t]o some readers it may seem that a certain predilection for that same amour de l’impossible (manifested especially in his finest sonnets) on the part of Mr. Symonds himself may have made him particularly and excessively keen to its existence in Marlowe’. Lee, The Academy xxv (8 March 1884), 159–60. I treat this topic more fully in Chapter 4, in my analysis of Wilde.
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© 2009 Stefano Evangelista
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Evangelista, S. (2009). Vernon Lee and the Aesthetics of Doubt. In: British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230242203_3
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