Ghostwriter à la Garçonne
Vernon Lee
Ghosts and hauntings are related, but not exactly the same thing. Ghosts are specters of the past—people who have lived before and cannot quite leave this mortal realm behind. But hauntings are more broadly defined. People can be haunted by ideas, by the past, by an obsession. Inanimate objects can be haunted as well, holding on to some nameless evil or trauma that won’t dissipate. Vernon Lee’s brand of supernatural fiction fits this latter category: less about ghosts resolving their mortal issues and more about people who can’t escape their own psychology. Lee’s characters are women obsessed with strange ancestors, or men who are artistically—and sometimes sexually—frustrated. And they’re all dangerously preoccupied with, and almost possessed by, the past.
“Vernon Lee” was the pen name of the British writer Violet Paget, who became known for her supernatural tales as well her views on aesthetics. Born in 1856 to expatriate British parents living in France, Lee led a wandering existence. Her mother, Matilda, was an heiress, though her inheritance was locked in legal battles. So they were not exactly poor, but the Pagets frequently had to move to more affordable locales. Violet was a bright child who spoke several languages; she was friends with John Singer Sargent (who would later gain fame as an artist) and his sister Emily. The children reportedly played together frequently; a favorite game was to read about historical executions in books and then act them out. Emily and Violet remained close throughout their adult lives.
Violet enjoyed writing from an early age, publishing her first story (in French no less) called “Les aventures d’une pièce de monnaie” in 1870, when she was fourteen years old, in the Swiss magazine La Famille. The story is about the adventures of a coin as it travels from person to person, moving through history. As she continued to write, her work showed her range of interests, from history to art to philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of aesthetics, or the study of beauty. In 1873, her mother finally received her full inheritance, and the family settled in Florence, a place that Violet would always consider home.
In 1875, Paget adopted the public name of Vernon Lee, though she would alternate between the two in her personal life. At that time it wasn’t imperative for a woman to adopt a male name in order to be published—Lee’s female contemporaries were writing under their own names—but Lee felt that she would not be taken seriously as an art critic and philosopher if she used a woman’s name. According to Vineta Colby’s 2003 biography, Lee said, “No one reads a woman’s writings on art, history and aesthetics with anything but unmitigated contempt.”
Spectral Psychology
We may think of people who lived during the Victorian era and the decades after as staid, prudish, buttoned up, and intolerant, but Lee wore her feminism—and, during World War I, her pacifism—on her sleeve. In fact, she literally used her wardrobe to show how she felt about Victorian conventions. In an 1881 painting by Sargent, she wears men’s clothing (known as à la garçonne, or more masculine “gentlewoman,” fashion), highlighting her famous androgynous style. Her choice of Vernon as a pen name shows a rebellious attitude toward social constructions of gender (as was Lee, which was her half-brother Eugene’s surname).
She also was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women, including the writer Mary Robinson, beginning in 1878. At this time, Lee was writing prolifically, sometimes publishing more than one work per year; her highly praised book on art, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was published during their relationship. Also during this prolific period, Lee began a friendship with the author Henry James, to whom she would dedicate her 1884 novel Miss Brown (W. Blackwood). (James hated the book, saying it wasn’t representative of Lee’s talent.) Unfortunately, the happy streak did not last.
Robinson broke off their relationship in 1887 and married a man soon after. Lee almost immediately began a new relationship with Clementina “Kit” Anstruther-Thomson. Lee, who had always been prone to anxiety, struggled to recover from Robinson’s abrupt departure, and her writing changed significantly following the breakup. Roughly from 1889 to 1902, she began to write more supernatural tales, particularly with a psychological haunting at their core. In an essay in her book Belcaro (W. Satchell, 1881), she detailed her thoughts on how hauntings and ghosts function in art and literature: “We none of us believe in ghosts as logical possibilities, but we most of us conceive them as imaginative probabilities…. By ghost we do not mean the vulgar apparition which is seen or heard in told or written in tales; we mean the ghost which slowly rises up in our mind, the haunter not of corridors and staircases, but of our fancies.”
Ghosts interested Lee not because they could be real, but because of what they revealed about the people telling (and reading) the stories about them. Her ghost stories were less chilling and more psychological excavations into how humanity sees itself.
Lee’s two best known supernatural works were the short novel A Phantom Lover (Roberts Brothers, 1886) and the collection Hauntings (Heinemann, 1890). In her preface to Hauntings, she dismissed the investigations of psychical societies and their attempts to collect evidence of genuine ghosts. In Lee’s view, people tell and read such stories because ghosts are mysterious, weird, and strange. Ghosts engage our imaginations.
Her stories often feature women who defy societal expectations in their behavior and dress. One of the female characters in A Phantom Lover is a cross-dresser with a penchant for Elizabethan fashion who becomes the object of another woman’s obsession. Lee’s hauntings often manifest as possessions, allowing her to explore lesbian love and women’s relationships as subtext, at a time when society did not accept them.
Vernon Lee’s longest love connection was with Clementina “Kit” Anstruther-Thomson. In her 2003 biography of Lee, Vineta Colby described their partnership as a type of marriage. It was brought down by scandal—but not over their same-sex relationship. Lee was struck by Kit’s physical responses to beauty and adapted her aesthetic theories accordingly. Together the couple wrote an essay about the physical and emotional experience of art, titled “Beauty and Ugliness.” The pair was accused of plagiarism, and though the accusations were later discredited, Kit never recovered from the stress of the controversy, and the relationship did not survive.
Reading List
Not to be missed: Vernon Lee’s ghost stories are best when she relies on her education in history and art to help set the stage. Broadview Press published Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales in 2006, a collection of Lee’s best-known ghostly tales. “A Phantom Lover” is set in an English manor house, but many of her other supernatural stories take place in Germany, Spain, or Italy. “Amour Dure” is about a historian who falls in love with a woman he sees in a medieval painting. Another selection worth seeking out is “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady,” which involves a tapestry that features a snake-tailed woman whose image haunts the protagonist.
Also try: For those interested in Lee’s life, the scholar Vineta Colby wrote Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (University of Virginia Press, 2003), a meticulously researched biography that takes readers through Lee’s bohemian childhood and into her remarkable life as an intellectual and writer.
Related work: Readers who like a bit of psychology and art with their spirits may enjoy Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (first published in the New England Magazine, January 1892). The ghosts in this story dwell not in the walls but in the mind of the main character, whose psychosis only worsens when her access to art and society is taken away from her. The story is widely anthologized and should be read by anyone interested in psychological horror.
