Plural Anomalies: Gender and Sexuality in Bio-Critical Readings of Vernon Lee

Abstract

Since the publication of Vineta Colby’s The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (1970), Vernon Lee’s work on aesthetics has received most attention from feminist literary critics (Colby 2003, 235–304). Gillian Beer has written that ‘Vernon Lee does not “fit”’ (Beer 1997, 109) and this statement seems to hold especially true for Lee’s numerous writings on the perception of form, beauty and ugliness, as well as on psychological and physiological aesthetics. In this chapter I take a new angle on these works and their reception, beginning with a survey of the secondary literature on Lee’s treatises on aesthetics and comparing this to existing and potential readings of similar writings by the connoisseur and art historian, Bernard Berenson, Lee’s acquaintance and neighbour in Florence who famously accused Lee of plagiarism in 1897.