Readers who are unfamiliar with the stories may wish to treat the Introduction as an Afterword.
In 1925, Vernon Lee, then nearing seventy, was invited by the London publishers Kegan Paul to contribute a volume to their phenomenally successful ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ series, a line of pamphlet-like volumes by leading writers and thinkers of the day, delineating possible futures. This quintessentially Modernist project had grown from geneticist J. B. S. Haldane’s provocative, proto-transhumanist manifesto Daedalus; or Science and the Future, whose enormous and immediate impact within educated circles (as well as that of Bertrand Russell’s sceptical riposte, Icarus; or the Future of Science) encouraged Kegan Paul to keep the ball rolling; and so was born ‘that brilliant series of little books’, as T. S. Eliot called it, if a little sardonically. 1 In all, over a hundred ‘brilliant’ (and sometimes not so brilliant) ‘little books’ would appear: slender volumes bearing such titles as Tantalus; or, The Future of Man (by philosopher F. C. S. Schiller), Aeolus; or, The Future of the Flying Machine (by WWI flying ace Oliver Stewart), and Halcyon; or, The Future of Monogamy (by feminist writer and nurse Vera Brittain), and influencing figures including Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, C. S. Lewis, and Arthur Clarke. (Sadly, Evelyn Waugh’s proffered manuscript, Noah; or the Future of Intoxication, was rejected.)
In keeping with the mythological conceit utilized by most of her predecessors, Lee titled her contribution Proteus; or, The Future of Intelligence, taking care, at the essay’s outset, to ward off any confusion on the reader’s part as to what, exactly, the elusive, shapeshifting deity of the Greeks represented to her. Not intelligence — at least, not directly — but the quasi-Kantian Real which this faculty seeks, for the most part without success, to apprehend: ‘Proteus, in my mythology, is the mysterious whole which we know must exist, but know not how to descry: Reality’. 2 In wrestling constantly with the Protean Real, ‘Intelligence’, which Lee primarily defines negatively (it is emphatically not ‘Intellect’, ‘Reason’, or ‘Logic’ 3 ), must remain flexible, nimble, responsive to change. In fact, ‘Intelligence’ for Lee is not a fixed, or indeed ‘natural’, capacity at all, but a cognitive tool that evolves in reaction to contingent circumstances. Lee envisions a host of coming ‘moral revaluations’ and social transformations stemming from this evolution, while nimbly stepping back, time and again, from the brink of definite prediction.
What would Lee’s departed Victorian contemporaries — friends and correspondents like Walter Pater, Henry James, Robert Browning, and John Addington Symonds — have made of Proteus? No doubt they would be initially nonplussed by the idea of ‘Vernon Lee’, a writer they associated, above all, with history and the past, turning futurologist. True, a careful reading of the text would dispel much of this sense of incongruity. Almost her last book, Proteus looks backwards as much as forwards; moreover, Lee is training the powerful lens of her historical consciousness upon intelligence itself — in fact, she comes close to identifying ‘Intelligence’ with historical consciousness, or what she calls ‘thinking in terms of change’: a habit, she asserts, which ‘dates only from the days of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon and Condorcet’. 4
But whatever else they might have thought of the book, it is almost certain that they would have been forcibly struck by the resemblance between its author and her chosen mythological figure. An intellectual fox if ever there was one, rather than a hedgehog (in the Greek lyric poet Archilochus’ conceit), Lee cut an extraordinarily Protean figure in the world of (primarily though not exclusively) English letters for over half a century, publishing stories, novels, a play, and a steady stream of books and essays in a myriad of modes and on a myriad of subjects. She wrote history, biography, polemic, travel essays, philosophical dialogues, and monographs on aesthetics, politics, music history and theory, and literary theory, to give a partial accounting.
Many of the ‘manifold embodiments’ (Lee’s phrase describing the multifarious aspects of Proteus) of this prodigious oeuvre have been all but forgotten since her death in 1935, though a process of active scholarly rediscovery has been underway for some decades now, and not solely in literary studies. Yet her supernatural stories — or better, given their ambiguity, ‘fantastic tales’ as she herself called them — have never been entirely eclipsed, earning especially high praise from aficionados, and practitioners, of the Gothic tale. In assembling his influential 1931 anthology The Supernatural Omnibus, Montague Summers selected ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and ‘Amour Dure’ to represent the author he considered almost peerless, in her mastery of the form: pointing to M. R. James’s skilful construction of atmosphere and attention to historical detail, Summers wrote, ‘I know only one living writer who can be compared with him on this point. I refer to Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), from whose Hauntings I am privileged to give two stories … Hauntings is a masterpiece of literature, and even [Sheridan] Le Fanu and M. R. James cannot be ranked above the genius of this lady.’ 5 Another James, warily ambivalent as he was about Lee and her fiction, expressed unqualified enthusiasm about the quartet of long uncanny stories which he received from her in 1890:
Your gruesome, graceful, genialisch [ingenious] ‘Hauntings’ came to me a good bit since; but, pleasure-stirring as was the gift, I have … been unable to control what George Eliot would have called my ‘emotive’ utterance until I should have had the right hour to reassimilate the very special savour of the work … I have enjoyed again, greatly, the bold, aggressive speculative fancy of them. 6
Well — perhaps the enthusiasm was not entirely unqualified; even as Henry James praises Lee’s ‘ingenious tales, full of imagination’, he cannot resist sneering at the mould in which she has cast them: ‘The supernatural story, the subject wrought in fantasy, is not the class of fiction I myself most cherish … But that only makes my enjoyment of your artistry more of a subjection.’
Very soon after being ‘stirred’ and, apparently, shaken by Hauntings, and for all his pooh-poohing of the form, James would resume writing supernatural fiction himself, after a very long interval. More, while his early ghost stories, such as ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’ (1868) and ‘De Grey: A Romance’ (1868), had been both conventional and comparatively paltry specimens of the genre, the products of James’s second phase of supernatural writing, beginning with ‘Sir Edmund Orme’ (1891) and culminating in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898), are not only finer but marked by a greater psychological orientation, a heightened degree of ambiguity. It is in just these qualities — in inclining towards what James termed the ‘quasi-supernatural’ — that they resemble such equivocal ‘hauntings’ as Lee’s ‘A Phantom Lover’ (‘Oke of Okehurst’ in the collection she sent him). Yet while James’s influence on Lee is acknowledged, the possibility of reciprocal influence is rarely considered. 7 This is symptomatic of many assessments — even highly positive ones — of Lee the ‘weird’ writer: she is lauded for her imagination and craftsmanship but seldom viewed as an innovator in the field, though her particular approach to engrafting the nineteenth-century European historiographical imagination onto a Gothic framework, for instance, strikes one as distinctively her own.
Beyond insight into the development of the form, and simple (or not-so-simple) enjoyment, Lee’s ‘gruesome, graceful, genialisch’ fiction also offers us a lens for scrutinizing multiple aspects of European cultural history at the end of the nineteenth century. While her writing life was long, most of Lee’s tales of horror and the fantastic were written in the 1880s and 1890s (though some would have to wait years or even decades for book publication), with settings — England, France, Spain, and above all Italy — reflecting the ever-shifting backdrop of her own peripatetic life. The ten-year span 1886–96 alone saw the publication of ‘A Phantom Lover’, ‘Amour Dure’, ‘A Wicked Voice’, ‘Dionea’, ‘A Wedding Chest’, ‘The Legend of Madame Krasinska’, ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, and ‘The Doll’ — tales which engage, in various ways, such contemporaneous movements and themes as Aestheticism, Decadence, nationalism, sexual dissidence, and shifting gender roles, as well as any number of other literary, cultural, political, philosophical, and scientific currents circulating throughout Britain and the Continent during these years. Engaging with the past is itself a kind of wrestling match with Proteus, and Lee’s own time was, and remains to us, in many ways an especially complex and elusive one. Her unsettling tales of obsession, possession, and transgression — ‘intelligent’ in any and every sense — can also serve as a kind of borrowed ‘intelligence’ for twenty-first-century readers, in the sense in which Lee uses the word in Proteus: tools with which to better ‘descry’ the dynamic and multifaceted cultural milieu in which she worked.
In the wake of the Great War, George Bernard Shaw hailed Lee as ‘the old guard of Victorian cosmopolitan intellectualism’, marvelling that a twentieth-century Briton could be found who had remained immune to the ‘war fever’ which had swept across the nation in recent years (‘Had she been Irish like me’, he added wryly, ‘there would have been nothing in her dispassionateness’). To Shaw, Lee’s pacifist polemic Satan, the Waster ‘prove[d] what everyone has lately been driven to doubt, that it is possible to be born in England and yet have intellect’. 8 In point of fact, as Shaw seems not to have known, the woman who would become Vernon Lee was born in France (though appropriately in sight, as it were, of England, in Boulogne-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais), and spent her childhood shuttling between and among Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and elsewhere. These facts of her early life were crucial in fostering in Lee — born Violet Paget, in 1856 — that quality of pan-European cosmopolitanism which Shaw so admired; as Lee recalled of her family life, ‘We shifted our quarters invariably every six months, and, by dint of shifting, crossed Europe’s length and breadth in several directions. But this was moving, not travelling, and we contemned all travellers.’ 9 This early contempt for mere tourists did not prevent Lee from later writing a great many books for their consumption, and in her nonpareil travel essays and other autobiographical writings we catch vivid glimpses of her continental upbringing: she writes of enchanted Christmases in Germany; of a succession of governesses Swiss and German, who exposed the precocious Violet, unsystematically but with contagious enthusiasm, to Schiller, Mozart, Goethe, and the Brothers Grimm; and of wandering the streets of Rome with her playfellow, the future painter John Singer Sargent, the pair of them ‘bombarding’ pigs with ‘acorns and pebbles’ one minute, ‘hunt[ing] for bits of antique marbles [and] digging them out of the pavement with our umbrella ferrules’ the next. 10
Lee was the child of a second marriage, her mother, Matilda Paget (formerly Lee-Hamilton), having wedded the tutor she had engaged for her son Eugene’s education. In the familial quartet thus forged, Henry Paget gives the impression of having been something of a supporting actor, with Matilda most definitely occupying centre stage. Contemporaries have left us a portrait of a diminutive, defiant throwback to an earlier age: a cosmopolitan woman in her own right, with the sensibility of an eighteenth-century saloniste. The great love of Vernon Lee’s life, Mary Robinson, 11 would later write of Matilda’s ‘tremulous sensibility, her dominating will, her generous benevolence’, adding, ‘she was like … some friend of Buffon’s, or patroness of Rousseau’s … one could never think of her as wholly French or wholly English — “she came from Cosmopolis” ’ (a reference, perhaps, to Paul Bourget’s 1892 novel of that name). 12 Lee attributed, apparently quite seriously, this ‘dominating will’ to her mother’s descent from a colonial family which had made its fortunes in the West Indies before settling in Wales: ‘It is the old slave driving spirit in the planter blood.’ 13 It is not difficult to trace the origin of Lee’s lifelong, Carlylean drive to work, to produce, at least in part, in her early internalization of this colonially inflected dynamic: as she would later write in her commonplace book, ‘Myself is my strongest (& often worst) slave driver’. 14
Equally important to her development was Lee’s relationship with her half-brother Eugene, as well as the often-toxic dynamic generated by and within the Matilda–Eugene–Violet triad. (Again, Henry is the odd figure out — perhaps it is significant that, almost immediately after inventing the pseudonym ‘H[enry]. P[aget]. Vernon Lee’, Violet lopped off the preliminary initials.) Matilda Paget doted on her son; her letters to him at Oxford, with their affectedly Quakerish idiom, sound as if they were written by a hyper-solicitous maternal Polonius: ‘Hast thou quinine pills with thee? If not, pray immediately desire a druggist to make thee up a scruple in 20 pills … Pray be on thy guard against the transitions of temperature!’ 15 One does not need to be a Freudian to view Eugene as a quite literal casualty of this dotage: while in his late twenties, with a promising future in the Diplomatic Service ahead of him (albeit one about which he was highly ambivalent), he was transformed, with disconcerting suddenness, into a complete invalid, by means of a mind-forged paralysis about which we shall have more to say. When Eugene returned home in 1873, the hitherto nomadic Paget family ceased its wanderings and settled in Florence, anchored there, so to speak, by his immobile body, which appears in his own sonnets as a grotesque, even uncanny thing: he writes of the agony of ‘keep[ing] through life the posture of the grave’, bound to a
Hybrid of rack and of Procrustes’ bed,
Thou thing of wood, and leather, and of steel,
Round which, by day and night, at head and heel,
Crouch shadowy Tormentors, dumb and dread.16
Shadowy tormentors there may well have been, but in reality it was Violet who was most often stationed at his bedside ‘by day and night’, in perpetual service as a combination of nurse and amanuensis. In such circumstances, with Eugene’s needs prioritized over hers for many years to come, it is astonishing that she found — or rather made — time to write, so much and so successfully.
Shortly before Eugene’s return home, the fourteen-year-old Violet already had published her first work: a serialized story, written in French, following a Roman coin in its adventures through history. She was at work on her first Gothic tale, ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’, as well: ‘My story (the one I am now writing) is greatly mixed up with Italian music, so I have to read up on the subject.’ 17 The origins of these tales, and of the intellectual obsessions of her adolescence more generally, lie in great measure in the summers the Pagets spent with the Sargent family. In long, as it were annotated, walks about Rome, Mrs Sargent gave Violet exhilarating object lessons in the power of the genius loci, the spirit of place, while she and John embarked on their own adventures of historical discovery. An 1872 visit to Bologna was particularly transformative: Lee would later recall how, as ‘a half-baked polyglot scribbler of sixteen’, she had spent ‘ten days of historico-romantic rapture’ in the old city, the two families together ‘rambling … by moonlight, through the mediæval arcades and under the leaning towers and crenellations of that enormously picturesque and still unspoilt city’. 18 By day, Lee dragged John — who was, in her imagination, already ‘the great painter’ of the future as well as ‘the comrade secretly expected to see in my vain self his equal and, so to speak, twin, in the sister-art of letters’ — to the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna, where they perused incomprehensible musical scores in superannuated keys and gazed up at the likenesses of Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and Gluck which hung in the neglected portrait gallery of the Accademia. One portrait in particular held them spellbound — that of Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, the superstar castrato singer of the eighteenth century, and as the two ‘lingered and fantasticated in front of that smoky canvas … in the Bologna music-school’, such epithets as ‘mysterious, uncanny, a wizard, serpent, sphinx; strange, weird, curious’ fell from their lips. 19
Like a protagonist in one of ‘Vernon Lee’s’ history-haunted Gothic tales (she adopted the name in 1875), Violet had become all but possessed by the culture of a vanished place and time: the Italy of the eighteenth century. The fact that this period had been largely neglected by historians contributed, surely, in no small part to the subject’s attraction to her; the teenaged cultural historian — for such she was — was staking out her own territory. ‘I didn’t care a pin about the Renaissance, or Antiquity, or the Middle Ages’, she would later write, adding,
I began to study that period — to read the books, even the newspapers, of the last century, which seemed to me full of actuality … I really did find my way into that period, and really did live in it … I had little or no connection with anything else. The eighteenth century existed for me as a reality, surrounded by faint and fluctuating shadows, which shadows were simply the present. 20
The fruits of this intensive immersion in the all-but-forgotten cultural productions of eighteenth-century Italy were published in Fraser’s Magazine (where Lee’s first article in English, on ‘Tuscan Peasant Plays’, had already appeared), as lengthy essays on such comparatively recondite subjects as the Arcadian Academy (Accademia dell’Arcadia, a Roman literary society founded in 1690), music historian Charles Burney’s 1770 journey through France and Italy, and the life and work of the once-preeminent librettist of opera seria, and bosom friend of Farinelli, Pietro Metastasio.
In this piecemeal fashion did Lee’s first book, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, take shape (she would round out the volume with studies of the Italian commedia dell’arte and the Venetian playwrights Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi). Widely reviewed and, for the most part, well received upon its publication in 1880, the book would serve, in large measure, as her ticket of entrée into the literary and intellectual circles of England the following summer. It also served as a breeding-ground for the first of Lee’s ‘culture-ghosts’ — a coinage she came to regard, or to affect to regard, with a sense of embarrassment:
let me confess … that this correct ghost such as he was introduced to the reading public was distinguished by the adjectively employed noun culture; he was a ‘Culture-Ghost’ … the word culture signifying in the earliest ’eighties anything vaguely connected with Italy, art, and let us put it, the works of the late J. A. Symonds. 21
The quotation is from the introduction to Lee’s final collection of stories, For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927), in which ‘A Culture-Ghost; or, Winthrop’s Adventure’ finally appeared in book form, unaltered beyond her lopping off the clunky first half of the original title. This is most definitely a ‘culture-story’ according to the above-quoted definition of ‘culture’, as are ‘A Wicked Voice’, ‘Amour Dure’, and ‘A Wedding Chest’, a tale of quattrocento Umbria which resembles a pastiche of Renaissance historian Francesco Matarazzo’s Chronicles of the City of Perugia. There is some evidence that in writing these stories Lee considered herself to be pioneering a new Gothic form, or at least flavour: 22 replying to and, as it were, doubling down on, William Blackwood’s rejection of her story ‘Medea da Carpi’ (later ‘Amour Dure’) for Blackwood’s Magazine, 23 she tried, with equal lack of success, to sell the publisher on the idea of bundling it together with the earlier ‘A Culture-Ghost’:
I don’t suppose it is much use asking, but before applying elsewhere, I should be glad to know whether you would care to publish this & another similar story of what I may term ‘Culture–Supernatural’ which appeared, & was much talked of, in the Jan 81 number of Longmans? They are highly finished little things, & I shd like to see them in a tiny volume. 24
It may be worth probing this prospective category of ‘Culture–Supernatural’ a bit further, particularly as the concept of ‘culture’ was just then undergoing significant semantic change. This can be seen, for instance, in the emergence of ‘cultural history’, a field of study with which Lee’s stories have a symbiotic relationship. It is a cliché to say of Lee’s stories merely that they are ‘haunted by the past’ (the same could be said of most Gothic and horror fiction); what Lee brings to the fantastic tale, to a degree which few have done before or since, is an exquisitely developed historical consciousness, one in tune with the multidimensional conception of history associated particularly with the Swiss historian Jakob Burkhardt, author of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Such stories as ‘Amour Dure’ fuse the Gothic tale with this nineteenth-century historiographic imagination, imbuing the story with a formidable ‘thickness’ of historical particularity. Another likely influence on Lee was the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Gothic tales she seems to have envisioned as models for her own, writing her mentor Henrietta Jenkin (another important female influence in Lee’s life) in 1874, ‘I do not think that a regular magazine, Fraser for instance, would accept stories tales of the length & sort of Mrs Gaskell’s ghost stories’ 25 (apparently she was already scouting potential markets for her first ‘culture-ghost’). It is not difficult to imagine Lee drawing inspiration from the carefully realized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settings of such stories and novellas as ‘Lois the Witch’, ‘The Grey Woman’, and ‘The Poor Clare’ (the latter tale also features a portrait which anticipates Lee’s ‘Virgin of the Seven Daggers’). 26
Noteworthy, too, is the attention Lee pays to the modes and mechanisms of cultural transmission, her interest (perhaps inspired by that proto-media theorist of the Victorian age, Walter Pater) in the media of the past — inevitable harbingers of Lee’s ‘spurious ghosts’, as she called them. There is, of course, nothing novel in the idea that the revenants of the past return to plague us through haunted or cursed objects, and the device of the haunted portrait in particular, whose iconic resemblance to its departed subject gives it a special place among such artefacts, is a Gothic trope of long standing. But consider, in ‘Amour Dure’, the multi-media assault which Medea da Carpi launches against the hapless cultural historian Spiridion Trepka, rather like a Renaissance version of Sadako from the Japanese horror film Ringu: she first appears to him in the ‘dry pages’ of history books; he then finds a miniature of her, a marble bust, a historical painting in which she appears, her handwritten letters, and a portrait in oils; he then begins to receive new letters written by her, with her punning device stamped in wax (he even writes, or perhaps channels, a haunting, and similarly punning, poem-song, ‘Medea, mia dea’). Many media; invariably, however, Medea is the message.
Perhaps the story in which Lee most deeply probes the idea of culture as a dynamic, evolving concept is ‘A Wicked Voice’, her thoroughgoing revision of ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’. While both tales concern the haunting of a nineteenth-century man by a castrato singer from the past, the scene has shifted from Bologna to Venice, and the singer is now villain — a ‘vocal villain’, in Lee’s phrase — rather than victim. Significant, too, is the emphatic recentring of the locus of the uncanny music in the ‘voice’ itself, as a detachable organ or object, rather than the singer. One suspects that the shifting media ecology of the intervening decade helped to shape, perhaps to inspire, this rewriting. Lee would later write that Farinelli ‘would not have been merely a ghost but an awful, audible, deathless reality like Caruso quavering from a house-boat at Hampton Court, if gramophones had been invented a couple of centuries earlier … ignorant that gramophones were about to be invented, what would we [she and Sargent] not have given if some supernatural mechanism had allowed us to catch the faintest vibrations of that voice!’ 27 Given that the technology first appeared between the composition of Lee’s two stories, 28 it is tempting to see the later tale’s account of a portable, disembodied voix acousmatique, contrasting with Winthrop’s simultaneous, integrated experience of embodied singer and song, as a response to the new paradigm for the storage and mechanical reproduction of sound. 29
Neither of the baleful arias in these stories (as ‘mal-arias’, they punningly mirror the malarial ‘bad air’ and ‘fever’ which also threaten the health of Magnus and Winthrop, respectively) kill their hearers, but both men are blighted by their experience, with Magnus suffering from a particularly horrible (to a composer) form of haunting or possession. It is not a spirit which possesses him, however — a consciousness or personality — but an idiom, a way of thinking and writing, of expressing himself. And here we can see Lee figuring the strangeness of enculturation itself — the process by which we ‘become ourselves’ through, paradoxically, the internalization of texts and other cognitive technologies, alien artefacts from the past. Stricken with a bad case of the eighteenth century, Magnus laments, ‘I am wasted by a strange and deadly disease. I can never lay hold of my inspiration. My head is filled with music which is certainly by me, since I have never heard it before, but which still is not my own’ (p. 162). As an artist, he is no longer ‘himself’, no longer ‘original’. But what does this really mean? Before his penetration by Zaffirino’s infectiously ‘languishing phrases’, Magnus had been a perfect Wagnerite; now he is a perfect … Porporite, perhaps. 30 The transformation is only so disconcerting, so catastrophically threatening to his sense of self, because he had naturalized the Wagnerian idiom; culture, the story reminds us, both precedes and constructs the individual. As if to reinforce this point, the reader is presented with a series of seeming dichotomies between nature and culture which, upon closer inspection, resolve themselves into a spectrum comprising different kinds or levels of culture: Magnus leaves the city, site of high (as well as vulgarly popular) culture, for the country. But the country is itself defined, quite insistently, in terms of other forms of ‘culture’: agriculture, horticulture, sericulture. As Raymond Williams shows, over the course of the nineteenth century the residual meaning of ‘culture’ as the ‘tending of … crops and animals’ continued to give way to its modern sense, or rather multiple senses, including first of all the idea of human intellectual and artistic development. 31 In ‘A Wicked Voice’ (and to an extent ‘Winthrop’s Adventure’), Lee pointedly juxtaposes both of these meanings, as if to say: There is no escaping the grip of culture.
A second book by Lee, far less heralded then and today nearly forgotten, appeared at the same time as Studies in the Eighteenth Century, a ‘dainty little volume’ (in the words of a reviewer) highlighting Lee’s keen and abiding interests in folklore, philology, comparative mythology, and popular narrative traditions. Considered together, these two early books go a long way towards emblematizing her fantastic stories, which, not unlike the work of such Modernists as Joyce and Eliot, blend history with myth, two equally rich sources of inspiration to her.
Tuscan Fairy Tales (Taken down from the Mouths of the People) shows Lee taking on, or perhaps more accurately flirting with, the roles of folklorist and collector of Märschen. These roles had been pioneered by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose celebrated retellings of German and European folktales had occupied a special place in Lee’s imagination since the days of her German childhood. After the Grimms came a veritable deluge, as nineteenth-century scholars sought to collect, preserve, and disseminate in written form a formerly ignored, and often despised, wealth of folk material — tales, poems, jokes, songs, proverbs — throughout Europe and elsewhere. Given that such orally transmitted genres had come to be seen as organically expressing the ‘soul’ of a people, it is no accident that the folklore hunters were particularly active in the two European ‘nations’ which were, precisely, not yet nations, that is to say, modern nation-states — namely, Germany and Italy. Lee’s entry into the field should accordingly be viewed within the broader contexts of nationalism’s rise in nineteenth-century Europe in general and, more specifically, the legacies of the recently consummated Italian Risorgimento (a presence in such tales as ‘Dionea’, ‘Amour Dure’, and especially ‘The Legend of Madame Krasinska’, where the bloody Battle of Solferino serves as the tragic catalyst for Sora Lena’s anguished madness). In 1860, the year the revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi landed his ‘Expedition of the Thousand’ in Sicily, the critic Alessandro d’Ancona had exhorted his countrymen to imitate the Grimms in documenting the popular narrative traditions of an aspirant nation, and the following decades — the 1870s in particular — saw the publication of a steady stream of Italian folklore collections, 32 harvested from the various corners of a nation only fully unified politically in 1871.
Three of these collections — Laura Gonzenbach’s Sicilianische Märchen (‘Sicilian Folk Tales’, 1870), Domenico Giuseppe Bernoni’s Fiabe e Novelle Popolari Veneziane (‘Popular Venetian Fables and Stories’, 1873), and Rachel Harriette Busk’s Roman Legends: A Collection of the Fables and Folk-Lore of Rome (1877) — are credited by Lee as inspirations for her own project:
It is no easy matter to obtain a glimpse of the popular mythology of Tuscany; nay, so disheartening are the suspicious reserve and assumed incredulity of the peasantry, that I long doubted whether any folklore really did exist among these people. But the rich collections of the folklore of Rome, of Venetia, and of Sicily … persuaded me that Tuscany could not be as barren of fairy tales as its sceptical and obstinate people would fain have one believe. Nor have I proved at all mistaken. Tuscany, at least the more remote parts, like the Val d’Elsa, the Garfagnana, and the neighbourhood of Carrara, whence all my stories have been obtained, possesses a very remarkable popular mythology. 33
Here Lee presents herself as a mere, if scrupulous, recorder of (as yet unrecorded) orally transmitted material, amassing a trove of ‘novelle, novelline, [and] fiabe’ and ‘select[ing] ten of the most striking of those I have heard, without altering any point of the narration’. To be sure, the extent to which Lee truly extracted the handful of tales which make up her collection ‘literally from the mouths of the people’, as she insists, is difficult to know for certain. But there are reasons to be sceptical. No doubt she did spend time among the Tuscan popoli, gathering material; a letter of 1879 refers to the store of ‘very curious facts about the life & ideas of these peasants, which I picked up last year while hearing fairy tales from them’. 34 But the omission, in the above-quoted preface, of any mention of the numerous existing Italian-language collections of Tuscan folklore with which Lee must certainly have been familiar, 35 with the implication that she was striking out into virgin territory, strikes one as disingenuous. One notes as well that the American folklorist Thomas Frederick Crane, while praising the manner of their telling, pointed out in a review that the ten stories in Tuscan Fairy Tales ‘are only versions of tales already printed in other collections’. 36 What seems most likely is that Lee saw an opportunity to corner the English-language market on the subject, particularly after the Englishwoman Harriet Busk’s collection of Roman legends had demonstrated how little exposure the English-speaking world had had to the popular narratives of Italy, and assembled a slender collection drawing, in some proportion impossible now to determine, upon oral and written sources alike.
If the book’s contributions to the study of folklore are slight, however, it yet remains a highly significant text when viewed in light of Lee’s own development as a writer of the fantastic. Certainly there are themes and images in the particular stories Lee chooses to retell here which resonate with her own fiction, as in the Sleeping Beauty variant ‘The Glass Coffin’, 37 ‘The Three Golden Apples’, and ‘The Woman of Paste’, in which ‘a sort of doll, but life-size’ is supernaturally animated; one of the tales, ‘The King of Portugal’s Cowherd’, even makes a brief appearance in ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, a nod, perhaps, to family and friends familiar with her authorship of the earlier collection. More generally, from her earliest years Lee devoured folk and fairy tales, fables, legends, and myths from a myriad of sources and cultures, drawing upon them for inspiration in a number of ways. Her fiction bristles with references to classical mythology, biblical (and, in ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, Quranic) stories, the lives and acts of the Catholic saints, and the narrative cycle known as ‘the Matter of France’ (legends involving Charlemagne and his knights, which would be used by narrative poets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance), among other sources. Some childhood favourites, such as the One Thousand and One Nights, remained perennial resources for Lee the storyteller: she writes of ‘help[ing] out the notion’ of ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’ ‘by re-reading a book much thumbed in childhood, [Edward] Lane’s Arabian Nights’. 38 Lee was influenced, too, as Pater and others had been, by the German poet Heinrich Heine’s conceit of the survival of the classical deities in a post-classical world as monsters or demons (see headnote to ‘Dionea’).
One collection which appears to have been a particularly rich source of ideas is Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, by the clergyman, novelist, and antiquarian Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), whose other works include The Book of Were-Wolves and a sixteen-volume Lives of the Saints. Lee read the book in 1886, writing to her mother in July, ‘I am sending off a copy of the book on Mediaeval Myth; I hope E. [Eugene] may find something in it. I will look out about the Were-Wolf book by the same author.’ 39 Certainly Lee herself appears to have ‘found something in it’, to judge by the traces to be found in her own stories. Almost immediately after reading Baring-Gould’s compilation, Lee began work on ‘A Wicked Voice’, with its young Norwegian composer trying to finish a Wagnerian music-drama based on the story of Ogier the Dane, one of Charlemagne’s knights. Baring-Gould’s treatment of the Ogier legend is slight, and Lee would have known of the figure from the Chanson de Roland and perhaps other sources as well. But it is suggestive that Baring-Gould links Ogier with ‘Siegfrid [sic] or Sigurd’, the mythical hero used by Wagner in the Ring operas Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, suggesting a possible spark for Lee’s idea of a counterfactual Wagnerian opera. Longer treatments can be found in Baring-Gould of the legends of ‘St Patrick’s Purgatory’, another key influence on ‘The Virgin of the Seven Daggers’, and of ‘The Mountain of Venus’, the story, used also by Wagner, of the knight Tannhäuser who tarries with ‘the pagan Goddess of Love’ in her subterranean palace, which Baring-Gould bundles together with other post-classical legends of the ‘heathen’ Venus/Aphrodite. Two Lee stories — ‘The Gods and Ritter Tanhûser’ and ‘St Eudaemon and his Orange-Tree’ — spring directly from these tales, 40 while Curious Myths contains several possible sources for ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’ as well (see headnote to ‘Prince Alberic’). As one soon learns when seeking to trace lines of influence in her work, however, it is dangerous to try to pin down the formidably widely read Lee to a single source; the wise reader will eventually make peace with the impossibility of running to ground each and every ingredient in her richly layered, overdetermined fantasies.
Lee lived during a transformative period in science and medicine, nowhere more so than within the many disciplines devoted to probing the mysteries of the human mind, seemingly every one of which left its mark upon Lee’s writing. Philosophies and sciences of mind and brain should, indeed, be counted among her most important, yet least explored, influences. The nineteenth century alone saw the parallel emergence of modern psychology and neurology, with the birth of the latter being embodied in the Napoleonic figure of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), dictatorial chief of the famous Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Throughout Europe and beyond, there proliferated new disciplines, discourses, treatments, and methods of documentation and representation concerned with mental disorders, including those manifesting as ailments of the body; so, too, did new kinds of institutions: the modern hospital, asylum, and clinic. In her non-fiction writing, Lee engaged directly with virtually all of the cutting-edge psychological theories of the day; her work on aesthetic theory, for instance, drew upon — and in turn was often reviewed by — such prominent figures as evolutionary psychologist Karl Groos, philosopher of mind Theodor Lipps, experimental psychologist Oswald Külpe, and Théodule Ribot, author of La Psychologie des Sentiments (1896), whom Lee would later call ‘my master’ in the field. 41 While writing critically of William James’s The Will to Believe, 42 Lee greatly valued his 1890 masterpiece Principles of Psychology. The end of the nineteenth century, of course, witnessed the birth of psychoanalysis, about which Lee expressed extreme ambivalence: calling the ‘obscurantist’ Freud her ‘bête noire’, 43 she was nonetheless forced to acknowledge in the aftermath of World War I that, despite the myopic focus of ‘the Freudians’ on sex as the master key to human experience, ‘their insistence on hidden springs of our thought and action’ represented a ‘great gift to psychology’. 44 Later, in a lengthy introduction to the English edition of her friend Richard Semon’s Mnemic Psychology, 45 Lee, roaming freely among the works of Ribot, German physiologist Ewald Hering, Samuel Butler, and Bertrand Russell, hinted that the work might contain the key to all future psychologies.
To be sure, and taking solely into account Lee’s sheer intellectual rapaciousness — her first biographer, by way of noting ‘the erudition of this provocatively articulate blue-stocking’, unspools a dauntingly lengthy yet necessarily incomplete list of the subjects represented in her library at Il Palmerino, from Marxism to meteorology 46 — it would be surprising if she did not evince any interest in contemporary developments in the study of mind and brain. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Lee’s interest in this particular subject was highly personal as well as intellectual, and often tinged with a decided sense of urgency. As her letters reveal, much of her reading in psychology was connected to, if not driven by, family efforts to treat her brother’s, and sometimes her own, psychosomatic illnesses. Rather like someone surfing the Internet in search of alternative remedies for a chronic condition, Lee, in long-distance collaboration with Eugene and Matilda, was always on the lookout for possible new treatments: in September 1889, we find Eugene writing dubiously to Lee about the ‘suspension treatment’ — in other words, being hung up like a side of beef for hours at a time — recommended in his case to Mary Robinson (now Darmesteter), 47 and more enthusiastically of ‘the wonderful effects recently obtained in Paris in diseases of the brain & spine by making the patient look at rotating mirrors; it produces apparently immediately a deep trance’. In response, Lee promises to track down ‘the Rotary Mirror man’ — this was Jules-Bernard Luys, author of the magisterial ‘brain atlas’ 48 Recherches sur le système nerveux cérébro-spinal — while suggesting that a course of hypnotic treatment, as recently advocated by psychologists Alfred Binet and Charles Feré, might represent a more promising possibility. 49 The great Charcot himself weighed in on Eugene’s mysterious malady: ‘I think the affliction comes under the category of cerebro-spinal neurasthenia, with peculiarities, however, which make it very different from the common type.’ 50 But it was not until the eminent German neurologist Wilhelm Heinrich Erb took up the case in 1893, declaring Eugene’s complaint to be entirely ‘produced by a very high degree of auto-suggestion’ 51 (as Lee had come herself to suspect), that his condition began to improve (though Lee’s ‘bête noire’ in Vienna might have had something to say about the fact that Eugene’s final recovery in 1896 coincided with the steeply declining health of Matilda, who died shortly thereafter).
Lee herself, meanwhile, suffered from depression and ‘on & off seediness with neuralgia’, and was subject to mental and emotional breakdowns, notably in the wake of Mary’s 1887 engagement. She saw herself as foredoomed by both nature and nurture (both, significantly, deriving from Matilda) to mental instability, writing in 1894: ‘I recognise now that my family is, on one side, acutely neuropathic and hysterical; and that my earlier years were admirably calculated … to develop these characteristics.’ 52 Furthermore, while Lee’s status vis-à-vis modern categories of lesbian identity may be complicated, she can hardly have been unaware that she would have been viewed as sexually non-normative, if not aberrant. Certainly many of her contemporaries so viewed her: some ‘caricatured [her] for her passionate celibacy’, 53 while her correspondent John Addington Symonds proposed her to Havelock Ellis as ‘a possible case-history, for the section on Lesbianism’, in what would become the pioneering medical textbook Sexual Inversion (1896). 54 We also know now that for years Lee did volunteer work, with her friend Amy Turton, at Florence’s famous insane asylum, l’Ospedale di Bonifazio. In short, she had both an intellectual and, as caregiver and sufferer, a deeply personal investment in the mind and its disorders. It is little wonder that she explored these topics in her fiction as well.
Mental disorders feature most centrally in two stories with intriguing parallels, ‘Oke of Okehurst’ and ‘The Legend of Madame Krasinska’. The former was first published by William Blackwood as a ‘shilling dreadful’ 55 bearing the more evocative title ‘A Phantom Lover’, and has been one of her best-known tales ever since. At one level ‘Oke’, which traces the slow unfolding of a folie à deux — or à trois — that ends in catastrophe, reads like a case study in abnormal psychology, much like Robert Louis Stevenson’s (far better-known) Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There are indeed quite a few parallels to be drawn between the two Gothic novellas, published within months of each other in 1886 (in the case of ‘Oke’ this was at Blackwood’s urging, perhaps suggesting that he saw in the story a potential response to Longmans’ coup in publishing Jekyll and Hyde). More than one reviewer compared Lee’s tale — favourably — to Stevenson’s. The St James’s Gazette declared, ‘ “A Phantom Lover” is probably the best shilling story since “Dr Jekyll.” It is short, it is startling’, while The Academy enthused that the novella, ‘alone among the recent numerous contributions to the literature of eeriness can be placed by the side of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, observing that ‘its style [was] sometimes as matter-of-fact as a report by a mad doctor’. 56 Probably it was one of these that Lee sent to her mother in August 1886 with the comment, ‘The enclosed review will please you: “Dr Jekyll” is a story by R. L. Stevenson; personally I consider mine very much better, but that is perhaps because I have no sympathy for the prosaic, unpicturesque kind of supernatural.’ (Writing to Stevenson himself earlier that month to let him know that she had asked Blackwood to send him a copy of ‘A Phantom Lover’, Lee refrained from dwelling on the superior merits of her tale, calling it ‘a very humble offering from a very sincere admirer’. 57 )
It is significant that the Academy reviewer, while both praising Lee’s story and linking it with Stevenson’s, likens it to a clinical report on a case of insanity. Jekyll and Hyde has been extensively analysed in relation to Victorian medical discourses: as a fictional exploration of contemporaneous theories of psychological duality, hysteria and other disorders, as a ‘literary stud[y] of the unconscious’, and, perhaps most of all, as a response to the influential ideas of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose l’Uomo Deliquente (1876) pointed to visible, physiological signs, stamped upon the face, of innate psychological abnormality. 58 Every one of these approaches can be applied with equal salience and force to ‘Oke’. Direct influence is a possibility — Jekyll and Hyde appeared early in January, while Lee was still at work on her story — but there is no need to presume it. She knew the work of Lombroso, writing of him, along with his fellow theorist of degeneracy Max Nordau, in her essay ‘Deterioration of Soul’. 59 She might have been familiar as well with such Italian followers as Augusto Tebaldi, the head of a Pavian asylum, who had also visited Charcot’s famed Salpêtrière. Two books by Tebaldi had appeared in the early 1880s; in the first, the reader was presented with a veritable photographic atlas of ‘cretins’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘idiots’, and ‘maniacs’, and other madmen and -women, and invited to read the truth of their inner maladies in the facial signifiers captured by the camera’s eye. The ‘maniaco’, for instance, could be identified by the presence of ‘le rughe longitudinali della fronte’ (‘longitudinal lines of the forehead’). 60 It is just this physiognomic peculiarity which appears on William Oke’s ordinarily unremarkable countenance in times of stress or agitation; at their first meeting, the narrator remarks ‘the only interesting thing about him — a very odd nervous frown between his eyebrows, a perfect double gash — a thing which usually means something abnormal: a mad-doctor of my acquaintance calls it the maniac-frown’ (p. 40). If, as Lombroso and his disciples insisted, physiognomy is destiny, then the tragedy of the novella’s conclusion is already written, as it were, in its first pages — a fact the narrator’s painterly eye, functioning like a mad-doctor’s camera, appears to intuit long before Oke’s mountingly erratic behaviour might warrant concern. Again Lee’s ‘shocker’ contains echoes of Stevenson’s; her narrator sees Oke’s hidden Hyde, but must depict his Jekyll: ‘It was with this expression of face that I should have liked to paint him; but I felt that he would not have liked it, that it was more fair to him to represent him in his mere wholesome pink and white and blond conventionality’ (p. 49). (Perhaps here, in the portrait manqué which would have revealed Oke’s darker self, we also see an anticipation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, written in 1889.)
Significant, too, is the ontological ambiguity of Christopher Lovelock, the long-dead Cavalier poet with whom Alice Oke is infatuated, provoking her husband’s murderous jealousy; as with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel in James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’, it is possible to interpret Lovelock as either a ‘real’ apparition or the figment of a diseased imagination (another reason to take seriously the question of ‘the Master’s’ indebtedness to Lee). It is especially interesting that Lovelock is described as a ‘phantom’ lover, rather than, say, a ‘ghostly’ or ‘spectral’ one, 61 given the emergent uses of ‘phantom’ — a word that straddles the supernatural and the psychological — as both noun and adjective in neurological contexts in the later nineteenth century (most famously, the American neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell had coined the term ‘phantom limb’ in 1871, in reference to the phenomenon experienced by many amputees). The psychological orientation of the tale generally, and Lee’s conception of a ‘phantom lover’ particularly, may well have been influenced by her reading, including the work of her friend Paul Bourget and of Hippolyte Taine, whose account of the brain and its ontologically elusive ‘fantômes’ (see headnote to ‘Oke’) might have helped to shape Lee’s conception of the Okes (Alice implies that she, too, experiences Lovelock — in how many sensory registers is left to the imagination — but this may simply be part of her sadistic play-acting). For his part, the narrator has evidently, like Lee, been reading up on the subject: shortly before the catastrophe of the tale, in an attempt to get his tormented host to ‘see a good doctor’ about his ‘delusions’ and ‘morbid fancies’, he ‘pour[s] out volumes of psychological explanation’, to which the distracted Oke can only reply, rather vaguely, ‘I am sure what you say is true. I daresay it is all that I’m seedy. I feel sometimes as if I were mad, and just fit to be locked up’ (p. 81).
Perhaps he should have been; certainly the narrator’s ‘mad-house doctor’ friend would have considered Oke, with that danger sign etched upon his brow, a candidate for confinement. But if the spectre of the institutional remains at the margins of ‘Oke of Okehurst’, it lies closer to the heart of another story of insanity and possession, ‘The Legend of Madame Krasinska’, first published in early 1890 in the Fortnightly Review. One might indeed call this a tale of two institutions, the first being the benign ‘asylum’ operated by the order of the Little Sisters of the Poor in Florence, where the young, beautiful American widow Madame Krasinska, as Mother Antoinette Marie, finds her true vocation and where, the reader may infer, the tragic figure of Sora Lena, the ‘hulking old’ madwoman wandering the city’s streets, might have found some measure of true ‘caritas’ or charity (another of the story’s core themes), had it been in existence earlier. 62 While not herself heartless, at least according to the standards of her class, Madame Krasinska commits a heartless act, masquerading as the Sora Lena at a ‘fancy ball’. Only her friend Cecchino (yet another of Lee’s painter-characters) sees the cruelty in her choice of ‘costume’ (complete with a cunningly wrought mask she has fashioned of cardboard, using one of his sketches as a guide). But then, he is not of her station: the high-society revellers, valuing, like the late-Victorian Aesthete of caricature, artistic ‘effect’ above all other considerations, including (or especially) moral ones, are as delighted as he is horrified by her performance, which both dehumanizes and gothicizes the madwoman (‘the thing’):
[T]here walked into the middle of the white and gold drawing-room, a lumbering, hideous figure, with reddish, vacant face, sunk in an immense, tarnished satin bonnet; and draggled, faded, lilac silk skirts spread over a vast dislocated crinoline. The feet dabbed along in the broken prunella boots; the mangy rabbit-skin muff bobbed loosely with the shambling gait … the thing looked slowly round, a gaping, mooning, blear-eyed stare … There was a perfect storm of applause. (p. 170)
The cruelty may be collective, but the karmic punishment is individual, as Madame Krasinska begins to be infected, or possessed, by the madness of the woman whose semblance she has put on. At the very moment of this triumph of simulation, the original has hanged herself from a rafter in Florence’s old Jewish ghetto (‘Suicide of a female lunatic’, reads the next day’s headline); thereafter, Madame Krasinska becomes a progressively worsening case study in psychological ‘alienation’ in the most literal sense, with the Sora Lena’s thoughts and memories intruding upon her own, mingling with them in what Lee presents as a proto-Modernist stream of blended consciousness, until finally she cries out, ‘Ah, I am she — I am she — I am mad!’
Madame Krasinska’s carnivalesque act of mimicry is thus performative in more than one sense, functioning as a supernatural invocation or invitation, an instance of what anthropologist James George Frazer had termed in The Golden Bough, published the previous year, ‘sympathetic’ or ‘contagious magic’. Even without the benefit of magical influence, however, Lee worried that madness could be contagious, transmissible — perhaps especially between and among women. As we have seen, she was acutely aware that mental illness might be encoded in her own hereditary make-up, speculating about the family backgrounds of other women as well, including Lady Archibald Campbell. The case of her friend, the Anglo-Jewish poet Amy Levy, may be particularly relevant here: Levy had committed suicide in September 1889, 63 prompting Lee to write to her mother: ‘But she had every right: she learned in the last 6 weeks that she was on the verge of a terrible & loathsome form of madness apparently running in the family.’ 64 It is unlikely to be coincidence that Lee dramatizes the suicide of the Sora Lena — and the near-suicide of the anguished, mentally deteriorating Madame Krasinska — in a house in the defunct Jewish quarter which Levy had recently immortalized in her essay ‘The Ghetto at Florence’. 65
It is telling, too, that the Sora Lena’s — and later, channelling her, Madame Krasinska’s — greatest fear is of institutionalization in the very hospital where Lee did charitable work:
Oh, no, no, not that — anything rather than be shut up in a hospital. The poor old woman did no one any harm — why shut her up? … Don’t speak of San Bonifazio! I have seen it. It is where they keep the mad folk and the wretched, dirty, wicked, wicked old women … The thought of that strange, lofty whitewashed place, which she had never seen, but which she knew so well, with an altar in the middle, and rows and rows of beds … and horrid slobbering and gibbering old women. Oh … she could hear them! (p. 181)
We can see a portion of this ‘strange, lofty whitewashed place’ in a celebrated canvas by Lee’s friend, the painter Telemaco Signorini (1835–1901), the almost naturalistic La Sala delle Agitate al San Bonifazio in Firenze (The Ward of the Madwomen at San Bonifazio in Florence), also known as Le Pazze (The Crazy Ones) (1865). It is tempting to see in one of the shrouded, almost shapeless figures depicted there — perhaps the stoutish one standing to the right of the painting, head bent to one side, hands held, or bound, behind her back — the original of Sora Lena. Signorini’s painting, no less than Lee’s tale, constitutes a hauntingly vivid portrait of the anguish, as well as the repressive measures, endured by ‘female lunatics’ in the nineteenth century. One must keep in mind, however, that San Bonifazio, under the direction of psychiatric reformer Vincenzo Chiarugi and his successors, was considered a model of progressive, humane treatment: visitors to the asylum remarked upon the fact that the primary method of restraint was the comparatively less restrictive ‘muff’ (manicotto); 66 the Bolognese journal Bollettino delle Scienze Mediche similarly noted the ‘padded leather muff’ which left the lunatics (alienati) at liberty to roam freely. 67 Is it too fanciful to imagine a connection between the prominence in Lee’s story of the muff, as an article of women’s clothing, and San Bonifazio’s iconic instrument of constraint? 68 At the very least, we may safely conclude that Lee remained ambivalent about the ‘best practices’ then in vogue for treating the mentally ill, perhaps mentally ill women in particular.
Anxieties regarding the relationship between mind and body, as well as those arising from the unknown, perhaps unknowable, contents of other minds, may also help to account for the prominence of dolls, puppets, and ‘effigies’ (a favourite word) in Lee’s fiction — and, for that matter, life. 69 Literary critic Susan Jennifer Navarette, who reads Lee’s fantastic stories as the product of a ‘fin de siècle culture of Decadence’, writes, ‘The doll [in the story of that name] takes pride of place among the effigies, stone idols, marionettes, and puppets littering the lumber room and enchanted garret of Lee’s imagination.’ 70 These ambiguously alive figures recur throughout Lee’s writing, from the egregiously Carlylean The Prince of the Hundred Soups: A Puppet-Show in Narrative, 71 to the ‘allegoric puppet-show’ she wrote in 1920, in response to a war which she viewed as a ‘ghastly Grand Guignol’, featuring an ‘archangelic marionette … my Puppet Satan’. 72 A satanic puppet also features in one of Lee’s last stories, ‘Sister Benvenuta and the Christ Child’, which centres upon a marionette performance at a convent, reaching its climax in a supernatural showdown between an infernal puppet which has been left behind (‘Beelzebubb Satanasso, Prince of all Devils’) and a mothballed effigy of the infant Jesus. And as we have seen, one of the folktales which Lee chose to adapt for what we may regard as her first collection of stories concerns a woman, ‘handsome and rich, but quite alone in the world’, who makes herself a surrogate daughter (‘a sort of doll, but life-size’) out of dough. This ‘beautiful woman of paste’ is animated by a passing trio of fairies; ‘a creature of flesh and blood now’, she yet remains a disconcertingly uncanny figure, with detachable body parts: one of the original, sepia-tinted illustrations shows her sitting, headless, surrounded by metonyms of domesticity — spinning-wheel, rafter-hung onions and herbs, a seemingly unperturbed cat — a kind of decapitated angel in the house. 73
Lee’s 1896 story ‘The Doll’, originally published in The Cornhill Magazine as ‘The Image’, can be seen as a revisiting of this early fiaba, much as ‘Prince Alberic’ — published the same year — revisits an archetype from folk material encountered by Lee long before. 74 In this ambiguously fantastic tale, a noble widower, ‘half crazy’ with grief, has a life-sized simulacrum of his wife fashioned of cardboard, satin and silk finery, and a wig made from her own hair. The narrator, an Englishwoman travelling in Umbria on one of her ‘bric-à-brac journeys’, comes across the effigy decades later, while treasure-hunting in the Count’s palazzo, where it has been taken from its closet into the laundry-room ‘for a little dusting’. The long-neglected, nearly forgotten figure is in a sorry state: hands cobwebbed, frock and bodice ‘grey with engrained dirt’, ‘a big hole in the back of her head’ (p. 254). An immediate ‘fascinat[ion]’ with ‘the Doll’, which for the narrator embodies, rather than merely represents, the long-dead Countess (‘I made no distinction between the portrait and the original’), quickly becomes something very like obsession, as the Englishwoman perceives, or imagines, in the effigy the presence of a kind of consciousness. Consciousness, in such a condition, implies suffering, and in the end, the narrator buys the Doll in order to give it — her — the gift of oblivion, through immolation in a backyard pyre of heaped myrtle, bay, and chrysanthemum.
Interpretations of dolls, manikins, and similar figures in literature and film most typically revolve around the famous conception of the uncanny (Unheimlich) formulated by Freud in response to German psychiatrist Ernst Anton Jentsch’s discussion of the anxieties produced by ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’. 75 In Lee’s case, one suspects that other factors might also be at play: Eugene’s own effigy-like condition, for example. But a concern with problems of intersubjectivity may be even more salient here, as evidenced particularly in ‘The Doll’. Written immediately after the death of Matilda Paget, the story is at one level a fantasy of mindreading, in which the unnamed narrator, intersubjectively challenged in her relations with other human beings, intuits, with preternatural ease, the mind of the Doll-Countess (this effortless access symbolized, perhaps, by the hole in her head). How often, one wonders, must a young Violet Paget have sat scrutinizing her diminutive, labile, domineering mother’s face, wishing that she could peer directly into her mind, and silently asking, ‘What are you thinking? What do you want?’
In the non-fantastic interpretation of the story, of course, the Doll’s head is empty, and the supposed contents of its mind are projected there by the narrator herself. But, as cognitive science tells us, that is all the contents of other minds ever are: a simulation, a mental model in our own heads. Lee appears to have had a particular difficulty, throughout her life, in constructing such models. To be sure, diagnosing the dead is a perilous business; moreover, the modern reader will find that many of the criticisms of Lee’s ‘abrasiveness’ and ‘want of tact’ voiced so often by her contemporaries smack of sexism (‘draw it mild with her on the question of friendship’, Henry James warned his brother, ‘She’s a tiger-cat!’). 76 But she was herself acutely conscious of, and perplexed by, a certain deficiency in the matter of ‘reading’ people. She seems to have been genuinely surprised, for instance, at James’s deeply pained reaction to her all-too-transparent portrait of him as ‘Jervase Marion’ in her 1892 story ‘Lady Tal’, the incident prompting the above-quoted warning to William (he had not relished the experience of recognizing himself in ‘the stout gentleman in the linen coat’, ‘a dainty but frugal bachelor’, ‘short [and] bald’). After the disastrous reception of her novel Miss Brown, which was both condemned for its ‘putrescent’ treatment of sex and resented, as ‘Lady Tal’ would be by James a few years later, as a roman à clef (Oscar Wilde, for instance, appears as ‘an elephantine person [with a] flabby, fat-cheeked face’), Lee wondered in her journal whether she might not suffer from a form of cognitive or intersubjective ‘colour-blindness’, incapable as she had proved of anticipating the thoughts and feelings of reviewers and friends alike, and even of knowing her own mind during the novel’s composition. 77 It is a striking choice of metaphor. Colour blindness, which had itself only begun to be studied scientifically around 1800, soon came to be employed analogically, to describe abnormalities or deficiencies of other kinds: John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, for instance, used it to conceptualize homosexuality. 78 Lee’s own usage interestingly anticipates accounts of ‘mindblindness’ in modern cognitive science, a field of study Lee would undoubtedly have found fascinating. 79
If a certain mindblindness arguably cost Lee some friendships in the nineteenth century, however, most notably James’s, it was unbending principle, deriving from her cosmopolitan sensibilities, which brought widespread opprobrium down upon her in the twentieth. As her beloved Europe drifted towards total, and in her view fratricidal, war, she found it impossible to hold her tongue, much less to rally behind the Allied cause. George Bernard Shaw honoured Lee for her stance, but to many it looked like simple disloyalty. Opposition to the war ended the warm friendship which had sprung up between Lee and H. G. Wells (who called her his ‘Sister in Utopia’); another former friend denounced her as a ‘parasite’, ‘traitor’, and ‘spy’, marvelling that Lee dared ‘raise [her] thin pretentious voice in support of the enemy of [her] country’. 80 During the conflict and its aftermath, Lee wrote pacifist satire and polemic; afterwards, she threw herself once more into the study of art, literature, and music, most notably in the insightful The Handling of Words (1923) and Music and Its Lovers (1932). When she died in 1935 Vernon Lee had authored a good-sized library shelf’s worth of books, of which Gothic and fantastic stories make up only a small fraction. Well might readers today wish that she had written more in this vein. But what she has left us — a small collection of richly ambiguous, deeply learned, and yes, haunting tales — is, to use a much-abused epithet, truly unique.