Vernon Lee: Decadence, Morality, and Interart Aestheticism

Abstract

This collection of essays ensued from ‘Vernon Lee 2019’, an international conference held to mark the centenary of Lee’s return to her Italian home, Villa Il Palmerino, after enforced exile during World War I. While Lee emerged as a significant writer in the heady atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism and decadence, she continued to publish extensively throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and her death in 1935, she produced a wealth of new material in a variety of genres including travel writing, novels, philosophical and aesthetic treatises, and compilations of supernatural fiction. As the new century dawned, she also became politically active; in the years leading up to World War I, her polemical pacifist articles appeared in the periodical press and she wrote an important anti-war morality play, The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915). In Beauty and Ugliness (1912) and The Beautiful (1913), she took criticism in exciting new directions, focusing on the developing field of ‘psychological aesthetics’; experimented with literary analysis in The Handling of Words (1923); and consolidated a lifelong interest in musicology in Music and its Lovers (1932).