Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–1935

Vernon Lee was the chosen name of Violet Paget (1856–1935), a prolific author best known for her supernatural fiction and her radical polemics. She was also an active letter writer whose correspondents include many well-known figures in fin de siècle intellectual circles across Europe. This multi-volume scholarly edition presents a comprehensive selection of her English, French, Italian, and German correspondence — compiled from more than 30 archives worldwide — that reflect her wide variety of interests and occupations as a Woman of Letters, philosopher, psychologist and political activist. Letters written in a language other than English have been expertly translated by scholars Sophie Geoffroy (from the French), Crystal Hall (from the Italian), and Christa Zorn (from the German). Full transcriptions of some 2000 letters are arranged in chronological order along with introductions, biographical notes and detailed footnotes that explain their context and identify the recipients, friends and colleagues mentioned.

In this third volume, covering the years 1890-1896, the 429 assembled letters follow Violet Paget-Vernon Lee from the age of thirty-four, when she lives with her parents and half-brother, the poet and invalid Eugene Lee-Hamilton, at Villa Il Palmerino (Florence), to the ripe age of forty, when both her parents died and her brother recovered from his illness and decided to leave home.

As Lee copes with Eugene’s invalidism and her own physical and psychological ailments, we get a view of the practice and teaching of medicine and nursing in Europe in the late 1890s. Lee sponsors her friend’s Amy Turton’s convalescent home and nurses’ training. Mental sciences are at the forefront, from experimental psychology, psychiatry and neurology to neurophysiology; and in August 1892, Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson attend the Psychological Congress in Paris, with speakers Hermann von Helmholtz, James Sully, Alexander Bain, Francis Galton, G. Stanley Hall, and Amboise-Auguste Liebeault. Lee came to consider herself as a psychologist as much as a philosopher of art and delved more deeply into experimental psychology; and with her partner Clementina Anstruther-Thomson she refined a theory of aesthetic empathy and inner mimicry. According to this theory, a viewer’s response to a work of art can be measured through his or her physiognomy, breathing, heartbeats and eye and muscular movements, thus providing a scientific basis for an innate appreciation of aesthetic...read more...