‘Struggling with the tempter’: the Queer Archival Spaces of Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson, and Amy Levy

Abstract

Burdett Gardner was the first scholar to gain access to the personal correspondence of Vernon Lee (1856-1935) after its donation to Colby College, Maine, in 1951. Yet his resulting monograph, The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian Style): A Psychological and Critical Study of Vernon Lee, was not published until 1987. This may have been due to the embargo Lee herself had placed upon the bequest, though her close friend and executor Irene Cooper Willis had published a collection of Lee’s private correspondence in 1937 and provided permission for the scholar Peter Gunn to write and publish a biography of Lee in 1964. Gunn addresses the embargo in his preface by suggesting that adherence to Lee’s testamentary wishes would impoverish her ‘extraordinarily precocious talents’. Therefore, he notes, Cooper Willis waived the prohibition in this instance. Why then was Gunn’s biography published with permission of the testamentary estate, and Gardner’s monograph subject to Lee’s proviso? I would argue that this was due to the ways in which each writer engaged with a particular aspect of interest in Lee’s archival remains: her sexuality.