Orientalist Aestheticism: Vernon Lee, Carlo Gozzi, and the Venetian Fairy Comedy

Abstract

Vernon Lee’s relationship with Venice might be described as troublesome yet productive. It informed a variety of her works including Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), her erudite history of Italian culture which includes chapters on Venetian theatre that focus on Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi; A Wicked Voice’, a disturbing story of musical possession that appears in her 1890 collection, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, in which a nineteenth-century composer becomes obsessed with the voice of an eighteenth-century singer; her novella Lady Tal (1892), a light-hearted satire in the realist mode; and The Prince of the Hundred Soups (1883), a children’s story that uses stock characters from the commedia dell’arte to tell the tale of  an opera singer, Signora Olimpia Fantastici, and her adventures in ‘Bobbio’, a watery city that can only be Venice.