Aesthetic Revenants and the Neo-Decadent Afterlife of Vernon Lee

Abstract

Anglo-Italian author Vernon Lee (1856-1935) and Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) shared a style of writing which has been described by Emily Anne Rabiner in The Decadent Renaissance: The Antimodern Seductions of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Vernon Lee as ‘Decadent Renaissance: a revival of, or a neo-Renaissance approach to aesthetics and sexuality’ (Rabiner, 2024). This revival of Renaissance symbolism is used by Lee, particularly in her fantastic tales to enable embodied and erotic encounters with the past. This article examines Lee’s use of the Decadent Renaissance in ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, first published in The Yellow Book in 1896, and extends this premise to investigate how the Renaissance revival style works when transposed into a twenty-first century neo-decadent mystery novel, such as Mary F. Burns’s The Unicorn in the Mirror.