This paper focuses on the correspondence between Vernon Lee and the German writer Irene Forbes-Mosse who, like Lee, was based in Florence, Italy. The two women met around 1900. They were at very different points in their careers—one seeking at that time to learn the craft of writing, the other long established as a writer and essayist—yet they grew close, even living together for a few years at the Il Palmerino estate that Vernon Lee owned near Fiesole. Lee was deeply attached to the Germanic literary and cultural traditions she had encountered during her childhood, and found in Forbes-Mosse a highly cultured friend who shared her passion for music (she sang and played the piano). It was above all the symbolism of her family origins that fuelled Lee’s interest in Irene: Forbes-Mosse was the granddaughter of Achim von Arnim and the niece of Clemens Brentano, two standard-bearers of German Romanticism. This gave rise to an intense exchange on contemporary European artistic movements which took the form of an extensive correspondence, parts of which remain unpublished. This article aims to explore the extent to which the two women’s dialogue around music echoes the key issues characterising the aesthetic debate of the time. We will also examine the contribution of this exchange to the two writers’ literary practices and collaboration.
In Vernon Lee’s story ‘Dionea’ (1890), an orphaned girl who is shipwrecked on the shores of an Italian town is believed by the locals to possess supernatural abilities similar to those of the goddess Venus. An artist’s attempt and failure to make a sculpture of Dionea ends in tragedy, with the sculptor and his wife found dead after a mysterious fire. In Lee’s tale ‘St. Eudæmon and His Orange Tree’ (1904), a young priest transforms a statue of the goddess Venus into an orange tree, as a form of ‘loving punishment’ for a prank she plays on him. The myth of Venus, and her representation in the form of a statue, is a central aspect of both stories, as is the connection between Venus and the natural world. Both of Lee’s tales showcase her interest in aestheticism, impressionism, and artistic perspectives, foregrounding gazes, light effects, and compositions. Both also depict a Venus that physically emerges from and returns to nature. This article examines how Lee uses Venus’ entanglement with nature and art—what we call Lee’s intermedial ecologies—to illustrate a notion of femininity that is not defined by patriarchal and anthropocentric norms. Through her representation of these two wild Venuses, which are enlivened by the intermedial textures of her prose, Lee’s stories depict instead a more expansive, queer femininity that moves beyond restrictive binary categories and celebrates woman’s refusal to be defined as (art) object.
Vernon Lee’s views on evolution were influenced by the legacy of Darwinism, i.e. by Charles Darwin himself, but also by such men as his most famous supporter, T. H. Huxley (1825–1895). In her 1925 book Proteus or the Future of Intelligence (London, Kegan Paul) she refers to T. H. Huxley’s Romanes Lecture, Evolution and Ethics (London, Macmillan, 1894), of which she writes that she read it ‘thirty years ago’ and has ‘long since forgotten [it]’. This paper intends to show that Huxley’s progressive and anti-Spencerian manifesto has not been really ‘forgotten’ by her and that it may have had some influence on her views on science and evolution. For Lee Darwinism is Proteus, as she could find in both Darwin and T. H. Huxley a hymn to fluidity and unfettered movement. The paper finally suggests that criticisms levelled at Vernon Lee on the basis of her attachment to the ‘superseded’ Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters should be reassessed today in an epigenetic perspective.
In her second collection of travel essays The Enchanted Woods and other Essays on the Genius of Places (1905) Vernon Lee recalls her impressions of European landscapes and cultural heritage. While viewing Buffalmacco’s Last Judgement and Hell (1336–1341) at Campo Santo, Pisa’s medieval cemetery, Lee asks what Dante would make of its vision of hell and claims: ‘And does not every generation of readers re-write the immortal poets?’ (Lee 1905, 21) This essay seeks to answer Lee’s question and locates her as an interpreter of Dante for a new century. Although scholars have typically characterized the Victorian reception of Dante as a ‘cult of Dante’ (Nick Havely xv, Alison Milbank 1), I argue that Lee reinterprets aspects, imagery or motifs to inflect the Victorian revaluation of Inferno with her distinctly ecological sensibility. Moreover, I show the ways in which Lee reimagines Dante’s Inferno as an ecological warning in her essay ‘The Forest of the Antonines’. In particular, she imaginatively reconstructs Dante’s la selva oscura to relocate hell, from an otherworldly realm to a place on earth or set of infernal anxieties to be confronted here and now. Furthermore, Lee employs Dantean contrapasso to describe the ecological crisis that affects the forest as self-induced and stemming from a human failure to recognize our embeddedness in a fragile, interdependent ecosystem. Consequently, Lee’s essay is grounded in modern, ecological anxieties about the struggle for human and non-human co-existence. Lee, therefore, suggests that humanity invites catastrophe by failing to recognize and preserve our intimate relationship with the forest. This essay enriches Dante reception history, Victorian studies, and eco-studies in general, by uncovering the intellectual and ecological resonances of Dante textuality in the writings of Vernon Lee.
This article argues that Vernon Lee’s short story ‘Dionea’ (1888), revolving around the return of Venus among mortals, hinges on the Victorian conflict that opposes John Ruskin’s art historical approach as regards the aesthetic legacy of the Renaissance to Walter Pater’s (and, more largely, the Aesthetic movement’s). This issue can notably be observed in their (uneasy or fascinated) interest in the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance paintings of Venus and the Virgin Mary. The study of art history shows the complementary nature of both figures, often conceived as twins rather than rivals in Renaissance tradition; however, Victorian writers and painters tend to erase this union of the intellectual and the sensual to replace it with a Manichean and anachronical conflict between good and evil. Shifting away from interpretations of Dionea as a Hellenic icon, this article studies the omnipresence of Renaissance iconography in the story and pays particular attention to the manners in which these two distinctive strands of Victorian art history reinterpret (and, according to Lee, misinterpret) the images of Renaissance to attune them to modern sensibilities—a phenomenon known as iconotropy that Lee’s writings condemn as artificial and mistaken. In this light, ‘Dionea’ stands as a critique of the superimposition of Victorian moral values onto the art of the past, and as a warning to the reader about the risks of stripping the cultural heritage of its complexity: true aesthetic pleasure, instead, is to be found in nuance, ambiguity, and one’s willingness to be baffled by enigmatic and foreign forms of beauty.
