04318nam 2200601Ia 450 991095712920332120251116182940.00-8139-2389-1(CKB)3240000000068565(OCoLC)812925032(CaPaEBR)ebrary10602559(SSID)ssj0000607819(PQKBManifestationID)11376571(PQKBTitleCode)TC0000607819(PQKBWorkID)10590377(PQKB)11386285(MiAaPQ)EBC3444060(MdBmJHUP)muse6604(Au-PeEL)EBL3444060(CaPaEBR)ebr10602559(BIP)32045136(BIP)7925917(EXLCZ)99324000000006856520020821d2003 uy 0engurcn|||||||||txtccrVernon Lee a literary biography /Vineta Colby1st ed.Charlottesville University of Virginia Press20031 online resource (414 p.) Victorian literature and culture seriesBibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph0-8139-2158-9 Includes bibliographical references (p. [363]-372) and index.Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The Infant Prodigy -- 2 The Eighteenth Century and After -- 3 Belcaro: Defining a Self -- 4 The Lesson of the Master: Pater and Euphorion -- 5 The Teller and the Tales -- 6 Miss Brown -- 7 The Buried Life -- 8 "This Clever Woman Who Calls Herself Vernon Lee" -- 9 Aesthetics and the Health of the Soul -- 10 Labora et Noli Contristari -- 11 Handling Words: From Practice to Theory -- 12 Music: The Apollonian Quest -- 13 Demons, Ghosts, and the Genius Loci: Stories of the Supernatural -- 14 Demons, Ghosts, and the Genius Loci: Travel Writing -- 15 "Sister in Utopia": The Aesthete as Polemicist -- 16 A Wilderness of Wolves -- 17 Hunting Proteus: The Last Years -- Afterword -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z -- Illustrations.Vernon Lee, born Violet Paget in 1856 to English parents who lived on the Continent, bridged two worlds and many cultures. She was a Victorian by birth but lived into the second quarter of the twentieth century. Her chosen home was Italy, but she spent part of every year in England, where she published over the years an impressive number of books: novels, short stories, travel essays, studies of Italian art and music, psychological aesthetics, polemics. She was widely recognized as a woman of letters and moved freely in major literary and social circles, meeting and at times having close friendships with a huge number of the major writers and intellectuals of her time, among them Robert Browning, Walter Pater, Henry James, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Berenson, and Mario Praz. Although she never committed herself to one program of political activism, she was an advocate for feminism and social reform and during World War I was an ardent pacifist. In her last years she watched with dismay the emergence of fascism. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography recovers this crowded and intellectually eventful life from her previously unpublished letters and journals, as well as from her books themselves. Vineta Colby also explores Lee's troubled personal life, from her childhood in an eccentric expatriate family to her several unhappy love affairs with women to her frank recognition that her work, brilliant as some of it was, remained unappreciated. Through it all, Vernon Lee clung to her faith in the life of the mind, and through Colby's engaging biographical narrative, she emerges today as a writer worthy of renewed attention and admiration. Victorian Literature and Culture SeriesAuthors, English19th centuryBiographyLesbiansGreat BritainBiographyAuthors, EnglishLesbians824/.8BColby Vineta222561MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910957129203321Vernon Lee758494UNINA