SOURCE: "Vernon Lee," in Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, Volume I, edited by E. F. Bleiler, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985, pp. 329-35.

[In the following essay, Clute offers a thematic overview of Lee's supernatural tales.]

Under the cover of "Vernon Lee"—the pseudonym of an expatriate—Violet Paget is a forgotten woman, a figure of the nineteenth century who lived much of her life in the twentieth, weaving for herself, over her later years, a legend of impenetrable eccentricity. Traces of that deaf, spinsterish, rude, interminable monologist survive in literary chronicles, and undoubtedly in some living memories. Far less easy to encounter is the young Miss Paget, born in France, childhood friend of the painter John Singer Sargent, precocious author (already as Lee) of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), formidable advocate of Walter Pater's austere aestheticism, uneasy associate of Henry James (whom she eventually alienated), and author of some of the finest tales of the supernatural in English.

The recent explosion of studies of women writers has left her anonymity intact. She does not appear, for instance, in Ellen Moers's magisterial Literary Women (1976), a book whose focus is on the nineteenth century. It is certainly the case that she is hard to characterize and even to locate, for she was an inveterate traveler, rarely resident in England, where she felt increasingly ill at ease as the years passed. Of her considerable literary production, about a quarter is fiction. Justly or unjustly, none of her five novels has been in print for many years, though The Prince of the Hundred Soups (1883), a harlequinade of some ambition, modeling its characters on the commedia dell'arte, may warrant revival; and Miss Brown (1884), however rough-hewn, comprises a mordantly comprehensive anatomy of English culture at a time when pre-Raphaelitism had arguably decayed into sham-medieval posturing. Louis Norbert: A Two-Fold Romance (1914) has perhaps suffered through misidentification as a novel of the supernatural, being in truth a subtle study in temperaments with a this-worldly resolution. Only her shorter fiction remains available to contemporary readers, and that in scattered form.

Of Lee's total production of more than forty volumes, at least thirty are nonfiction studies of Italian culture, belles lettres, travel books, polemical incursions into moral philosophy and aesthetics, pacifist denunciations of all parties involved in the destructive tragedy of World War I, and singletons like The Handling of Words (1923), a collection of close readings of literary texts that has had some influence on twentieth-century criticism. None of this output—much of it combining intense erudition with a mesmeric sense of place—is readily available today. Uneven, diffuse, recondite, her corpus is now occasionally referred to in footnotes.

From the beginning, Lee's life was one of estrangement, in both a geographical and a psychological sense. She was born at Château St. Léonard, near Boulogne, France, on 4 October 1856, the child of her domineering mother's second marriage. Matilda Adams' first marriage, to a Captain Lee-Hamilton (died 1849), produced a child, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, an invalid for psychosomatic reasons for much of his life, the demanding confidant of his younger sister, and eventually the author of a moderately successful novel of the supernatural, The Lord of the Dark Red Star (1903); like much of his far more capable sister's best work, this tale is set in medieval Italy and evidences much research. Eugene's tutor, Henry Ferguson Paget, from an émigré family, was Vernon Lee's father. He was of an erratic disposition, with an obscure past, though he had taught for a time in Poland, like the protagonist of at least one Lee story. He seems to have been the cause for much of the Paget family's incessant shifting back and forth across the Continent, a circumstance that, though surely unsettling, did enable his young daughter to experience at first hand the stable, glittering, rooted Europe that existed prior to the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Lee's distaste for World War I can be linked to her perceptions of this earlier cataclysm.

By 1868, the family had reached Italy; as a country of the imagination, as a field of study, and as a place to dwell, it became home for Vernon Lee, though several years passed before she was able to settle there permanently. Her first two books illustrate this clearly enough. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, which with considerable daring virtually invents that century as a subject of serious study for scholars of Italy, made her name overnight and remains of value today; and in Tuscan Fairy Tales (Taken Down from the Mouths of the People) (1880), it is possible to discern some of the forces that shape her later and more significant fiction. There is the antiquarian passion, the lust for the past; there is the scholarly indirection of approach (the tales are told as to an anonymous note-taker, and it is impossible to work out to what degree they are authentic dictations from the "people" of Tuscany); and there is of course the obsession with the Italy that had won her heart—an Italy haunted by the largesse of earlier centuries, a past constantly visible in artifacts, the immemorial gestures of live people, the odors and shapes of the land itself. Her Italy is animate or, rather, possessed.

The stories in Tuscan Fairy Tales, like much of Lee's later work, though far more simply, reflect that possession. "The Three Golden Apples," for instance, applies an Italianate glamour to the traditional tale of the youngest son who undergoes all the experiences befitting the early life of a hero, eventually returns to the open air from an underground kingdom with an enchanted princess whom he marries, and becomes king. But there is no complexity to the story, no hauntedness; there is no narrator. In her mature fiction, Lee almost always mediates the glamour of the beckoning past through the complex consciousness of a contemporary narrator, who does not, of course, necessarily escape scot-free, repressions intact, from the implications of the tale.

As an adult, Vernon Lee was short, frail, the victim of several nervous breakdowns, and displayed, as Irene Cooper Willis states in the privately printed Vernon Lee's Letters (1937), "a kind of fundamental helplessness which the violence of [her] nature tended to precipitate into impatience and rage." She traveled much, with increasingly long sojourns in Italy; eventually she made something of a permanent home for herself in Florence, though she was often elsewhere. She befriended the famous and harangued them on every subject under the sun. As the years passed, rumors that she was a lesbian with whom young girls were not safe narrowed her range of acquaintances. Her mind was acquisitive, ardent, quarrelsome, omnivorous, increasingly melancholy, and haunted by the past. She became deaf, deeply truculent, isolated, and often, as Willis states, "described herself as an alien, having no ties, of nation, blood, class or profession." Most of her best fiction was written before the turn of the century, though some of it waited many years for publication. The legendary harridan—whom some remember today—was decades past the difficult passions of her supernatural tales when she died on 13 February 1935.

Excluding the contents of Tuscan Fairy Tales, there are, more or less, seventeen tales of the supernatural in her oeuvre, plus one allegory, The Ballet of the Nations (1915), which she later expanded into a full-length cosmic drama, Satan the Waster (1920), not remarkably dissimilar to Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts (1903-1908). About the total number it is impossible to be exact. Some stories, like "A Wedding Chest," while not specifically supernatural, do evoke the same intense, supernal Italy of the best of the supernatural tales. It is also possible that some fiction remains uncollected—though one magazine publication that has been added to the supernatural canon ("The House with the Loop-Holes," from the August 1930 Life and Letters) on examination turns out to be an essay containing a perfectly worldly anecdote about marriage. Given the state of her reputation fifty years after her death, it is perhaps not surprising that no proper checklist of Lee's works exists. We must rest content with the seventeen identified tales.

Most of them can be found in three collections: Hauntings (1890), Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales (1904), and For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927); one tale, Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child (1906), has appeared only in booklet form; and a few can be found in scattered volumes of Lee's other works. Most, but not all, of the supernatural tales can also be found in two posthumous collections assembled in the 1950's.

There is little point in attempting to sort Lee's fiction into chronological order. Publication dates in her case often had little to do with dates of composition, and in any case the two decades after 1885 can be treated as the high plateau of both her life and her creative output. At the beginning of this period she was something of a prodigy; at its close her readership was dwindling, she was seen as a figure of the past, and the exile of her later years had begun. She had not reached greatness by 1905; the chance of creating a masterpiece had passed.

Of Lee's best fiction, only two stories are set outside of Italy. In its quiet way, the earlier of these—first published in booklet form as "A Phantom Lover" (1886) and subsequently in Hauntings as 'Òke of Okehurst"—is as much a tour de force as her flamboyant Don Juan fantasy, "The Virgin of the Seven Daggers" (written 1889; published in For Maurice). Perhaps somewhat undervalued because of its drenched, tepid English setting, and because its protagonists are at least superficially routine creations, 'Òke of Okehurst" nevertheless demonstrates that its author, in 1886, breathed the same literary atmosphere as Henry James and was capable of anticipating some of his explorations into the relationship between the narrator and what he narrates.

The story seems simple enough and hardly worth the thousands of words spent on it. Young Mr. Oke, a country squire from Kent, engages a popular portrait painter (probably based on Sargent) to do his wife. The painter, who tells the tale, comes to rain-soaked Okehurst to find Mr. Oke's wife a figure of aesthetic allure but elusive to his brush. It slowly becomes clear that both Mr. and Mrs. Oke are obsessed—indeed haunted—by a family tragedy of several centuries earlier, when an ancestral Mr. Oke had murdered the lover of an earlier Mrs. Oke. The contemporary Mrs. Oke is obsessed by her likeness to the earlier and sadistically intent on displaying to her husband her amorous involvement with the ghost of the dead lover. Eventually she drives Mr. Oke into a murderous frenzy in which he kills both her and himself. The narrator is given Mrs. Oke's locket. The lock of hair inside it, he is convinced, is the ghost's.

From the very first sentences of the story, however, the reader may notice hints that 'Òke of Okehurst" is not at all straightforward. Here, as throughout, the narrative voice is that of the painter, and from the first it signals his will to aesthetic control over his material:

That sketch up there with the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. I wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not? The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of grace and research in every outline and movement. . . .

And so on, for several hundred words. If, at this point, the reader notices the close (indeed parodic) resemblance of these opening phrases to those that inaugurate any of several dramatic monologues by Robert Browning, he may well realize that Lee is depicting an unreliable narrator, and be prepared to see the painter take a far from passive role in the events to follow. In poems like "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto," Lee's friend Browning allowed his narrators to betray their intimate involvement in stories that are ostensibly objective. This is precisely what happens in "Oke of Okehurst."

Becoming obsessed with the elegant tale of ghosts and murder and sexual obsession, the narrator of the tale is soon manipulating both Okes into full belief in the haunting:

I had met in Mrs. Oke an almost unique subject for a portrait-painter of my particular sort, and a most singular, bizarre personality. I could not posibly do my subject justice so long as I was kept at a distance, prevented from studying the real character of the woman. I required to put her into play.

And later:

Mrs. Oke herself, I feel quite persuaded, believed or half believed [in the haunting]; indeed she very seriously admitted the possibility thereof, one day that I made the suggestion half in jest.

Before the story ends, he has also convinced Mr. Oke that the wife who is tormenting him (she mocks him, refuses to sleep with him) is a reincarnation and that she is having an affair with the ghost of her murdered lover. The ensuing tragedy comes as a direct consequence of the narrator's creation of the story that he needs for his art.

If the contemporary reader detects an adumbration here of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), he is unlikely to be misguided. 'Òke of Okehurst" depicts a folie à trois, and the reader is left as ambivalent about what truly happened as he is clearly meant to be in the later tale. Lee's novella can only gain by being read as an early tour de force in the presentation of an unreliable narrator. In this light, a quiet, overextended anecdote can be seen as a tale of genuine horror.

The Okes have no real power to ensnare the narrator of their tale; in the Italian stories, on the other hand, the Okes are replaced by the bright, implacable erotic complexity of Italy itself, from which no narrator is safe in his contemporary selfhood. Complexly and powerfully, Lee's Italian tales of the supernatural expose their protagonists to the intolerable suasion of the dream of a past whose allure is similar to that of a secondary universe as J. R. R. Tolkien defined it, where it is possible to engage in a world of ambient meaning, to love, to machinate, and above all to experience unmodulated aesthetic joy. But in Lee's world there is no final surcease from punishment; the dream of the secondary universe—at times expressed in passages redolent of an almost oceanic bliss—bears the retribution of death within it. The ghosts that convey its siren song— more or less literally in stories like "Dionea"—are finally poisonous. The reason for this is clear and deeply melancholy. In contrast to the work of a modern writer of stature like Robert Aickman, whose ghosts signalize the failure to achieve a full life, Lee's hauntings almost invariably punish the attempt to do so.

Of course, much of the supernatural fiction of the nineteenth century treats self-fulfillment in terms of the grotesque. Rarely, however, is the issue drawn so clearly or by a writer so skilled in evoking that which it is death to inhabit. Lee's biography offers a pat but telling explanation for this circumstance. Within the formidable dragon she made of herself in old age is discernible a very young person indeed, an adolescent Violet Paget, begetter of this bellicose Vernon Lee. The fiction, almost all of which was written well before Lee turned fifty, refuses the liberties of the world with a renunciatory passion that could indeed be called adolescent. The reasons for this lifelong act of refusal are speculative, though contributing factors might well include frustrated homosexuality, exile, physical unattractiveness, and being a woman in the nineteenth century. The result is a body of work that reaches significant stature only at rare moments of what seems to be self-forgiveness.

The stories contained in Hauntings certainly leave no doubt about their punitive effect. In "Amour dure," which is subtitled "Passages from the Diary of Spiridion Trepka," a Germanized Polish scholar briefly resident in Urbania finds contemporary Italy as estranging as the rest of his dour life and slowly becomes obsessed with a figure from the city's Renaissance past, the seductive Medea da Carpi, an ambitious machinator in the internecine politics of the time and a woman whose sexual favors no man survives for long. (Females whom it is death to love appear not infrequently in nineteenth-century fiction, certainly in that written by men.) Finally, gaining control of Urbania from her, the brother of her murdered second husband has her strangled by women. But she has sworn revenge and, in spirit form, promises herself to Trepka if he will violate the statue of her executioner, whose spirit will then be exposed to her. Trepka obeys and receives his promised reward—he is found stabbed to the heart.

"Dionea" is more complexly told than "Amour dure," in that it represents the letters of an Italian doctor to the benefactress who has provided funds for the upbringing of an apparent orphan, Dionea, who turns out to be an avatar of the pagan gods. She returns to the sea at story's close, after creating unendurable conflicts for an expatriate artist, who attempts to paint Dionea but finds her amoral pagan brightness fatally seductive. His attempts at aesthetic objectivity soon crumble in the face of Dionea's impersonal but haunting sexual allure, for she is reality unclothed; and for any of Lee's protagonists transfixed by the sight of that for which they long, reality is death. In a parody of religious ritual excess, he soon manages to sacrifice both himself and his wife to the unrelenting, indifferent goddess.

Art is also a frail buckler in "A Wicked Voice." Though the composer-narrator's aesthetic involvement in late-nineteenth-century music is presented with considerable and sophisticated acuity, he soon becomes inextricably entwined in a search for a ghost castrato from the eighteenth century who taunts him with fragments of what might be called—in the terms of this intricately argued fiction—pure melody. That reality unclothed can be embodied in the voice of a castrato suggests—it is never fully explicit in Lee's fiction—an extraordinary association between the amorality of art and unforgivable perversion. The narrator's anguished peroration to "A Wicked Voice" can stand for the mutilating savagery of Lee's own refusal of the haunting licentiousness of art:

O wicked, wicked voice, violin of flesh and blood made by the Evil One's hand, may I not even execrate thee in peace; but is it necessary that, at the moment when I curse, the longing to hear thee again should parch my soul like hell-thirst? And since I have satiated thy lust for revenge, since thou has withered my life and withered my genius, is it not time for pity? May 1 not hear one note, only one note of thine, O singer, O wicked and contemptible wretch?

As this quotation amply demonstrates, Lee is a writer of acute self-consciousness, and it would be presumptuous to suggest that any analysis of the relationship between her life and the strictures of her fiction would reveal material of which she was unaware. This knowingness is sufficiently clear in the stories contained in Hauntings but is nowhere more eloquently rendered than in the finest tale in Pope Jacynth, and Other Fantastic Tales, "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady" suffuses, through its complexly circuitous rendering of the love-death epiphany of young Alberic and his benign lamia, a sense of wise, relaxed forgiveness. As a result, the tale is told with a liquid gravity not found elsewhere in Lee's fiction; the seeming impassiveness of the narration (for in this case no narrator as such serves as a center of guilt-ridden consciousness) does not ultimately conceal the author's empathy with Alberic and his transcendent fate. The note of chastened irony that permeates the telling of "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady" seems somehow shared with its protagonist; though we never actually enter Alberic's mind and though his most heightened moments are only hinted at, we seem to judge through his eyes the decaying world he is so soon to escape.

Alberic's parents are dead, and so he is raised in solitude at the court of his grandfather, Duke Balthasar Maria, the ruler of Luna, a small Italian principality at the close of the seventeenth century. His main solace as a child from the sophisticated perversity of the duke and his courtiers is a faded tapestry at the heart of which is depicted a scene from the story of his namesake and ancestor, the first Alberic. Returned from the Crusades, the first duke is rendered with his arm protectively about a beautiful lamia—a figure half woman, half snake. He is eventually (we learn much later) to betray her.

The duke soon destroys the tapestry, because it is no longer fashionable, and rusticates young Alberic to a ruined castle. And it is here, lambently and in passages of sustained responsiveness to the genius loci, that Alberic finds himself, for this castle is like the tapestry. He climbs toward the heart of the ruins, "from discovery to discovery, with the growing sense that he was in the tapestry, but that the tapestry had become the whole world." It is, once again, like entering a secondary universe, but this time it is redemptive, knowing, sweet. Finally he reaches the well at the center of things:

The well was very, very deep. Its inner sides were covered, as far as you could see, with long delicate weeds like pale green hair, but this faded away in the darkness. At the bottom was a bright space, reflecting the sky, but looking like some subterranean country. Alberic, as he bent over, was startled by suddenly seeing what seemed a face filling up part of that shining circle; but he remembered it must be his own reflection, and felt ashamed. So, to give himself courage, he bent over again, and sang his own name to the image. But instead of his own boyish voice he was answered by wonderful tones, high and deep alternately, running through the notes of a long, long cadence. . . .

There is an echo here not only of "The Three Golden Apples" (from Tuscan Fairy Tales) insofar as the quotation represents a passage of self-discovery for the hero, but also of the legend of Narcissus, because his discovery of the lamia in his own reflection—for it is her voice that answers him—hints at the immortality, or stasis, of love-death.

The woman Alberic finds (it is a sharp, subtle touch) identifies herself as his godmother. We do not see their sexual embrace. We see Alberic grow to magnificent, princely adulthood. We see him imprisoned by his perverse grandfather. We see him remain faithful to the small snake he carries into his cell. When the duke has the snake mangled to death, Alberic also dies, so as to remain with her. But we do not really know what Alberic thinks. We remember mainly the scene already quoted, and one later, at night:

A spiral dance of fireflies, rising and falling like a thin gold fountain, beckoned him upwards through the dewy grass. The circuit of castle walls, jagged and battlemented, and with tufts of trees profiled here and there against the resplendent blue pallor of the moonlight, seemed twined and knotted like huge snakes around the world.

This is not the language of a writer unconscious of the resplendence of the allure that is elsewhere refused. It is a language redolent with achieved meaning.

On a smaller scale, much of Lee's remaining fiction reiterates the concerns of her best work, though we have omitted to this point making reference to those tales, always ironic, that deal with the Christian church. Of most interest in this category are "Pope Jacynth," "The Legend of Madame Krasinska"—in which an innocent American in Europe is submitted to a far more grotesque fate than ever Henry James cared to depict—Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child, and "The Virgin of the Seven Daggers." All have something of the mock-antiquarian tone of writers like Richard Garnett, though the last is a far more intensely realized jeu d'esprit than anything Garnett ever wrote. Don Juan swears eternal loyalty to his favorite version of the Virgin Mary, the statue called the Virgin of the Seven Daggers, before attempting by necromantic means to woo a Moorish princess entombed for four hundred years by her father's magic. After a bravura transit through the land of the dead, the don is forced to remain faithful to the Virgin when the princess asks who is the more beautiful. He is then beheaded. He awakens in Granada, only slowly to discover that he is genuinely dead. A miracle then occurs: regardless of the murders he has committed, and of other sins, the Virgin redeems him, and he is borne upward through her church, in the direction of heaven.

A fair assessment of Vernon Lee can only attend full examination of her formidable, eccentric oeuvre. Her novels may (or may not) be salvageable for a new generation. In the shorter fictions of her youth it is possible to discern hints of something like greatness. It seems that she herself could not allow these hints to flourish. This is our misfortune. Our good luck rests in the passages of wisdom that remain, which haunt us.