VERNON LEE was born a Victorian, and so in a way she remained all her life, an eminent but now almost forgotten one.

Although she lived on until 1935, much of the work which bears her peculiar stamp had been written, or the future shape of it foreseen, before the Queen’s death in 1901 brought that age symbolically to a close. If she had carried out her intention, expressed in letters at the turn of the century, and had written no more (she felt her books had failed to touch the public), she would have remained for us perhaps as a minor Victorian, a highly civilized, intelligent and versatile writer — yet still something of a literary curiosity of the period. She went on, however, into the new century, continuing and developing the themes she had already made her own, and in 1903 she published, what was for her a venture in a new field, the romantic play Ariadne in Mantua. Also about this time, side by side with those activities which may properly be called literary, she developed a polemical side of her nature which had declared itself even in her extreme youth; she became increasingly a controversial public figure, the propagator and critic of some of the disturbing sociological ideas which occupied thoughtful people’s minds in the first decades of [the twentieth] century. — Peter Gunn, p. 1

Biographical Material and Discussions

Works

Bibliography

Primary Sources (by date)

Lee, Vernon. Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. London: W. Satchell, 1880.

_____. Belcaro: Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions. London: W. Satchell, 1881.

_____. The Prince of the Hundred Soups, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1883.

_____. Ottilie: An Eighteenth Century Idyll, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1883.

_____. Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884.

_____. Miss Brown. Edinburgh: W: Blackwood, 1884.

_____. Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886.

_____. A Phantom Lover: A Fantastic Story. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1886.

_____. Juvenilia: Being a Second Series of Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions. T. Fisher Unwin, 1887.

_____. Vanitas: Polite Stories. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.

_____. Hauntings: Fantastic Stories. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.

_____. Althea: A Second Book of Dialogues on Aspirations. London: Osgood, McIlvanie &Co., 1894.

_____. Limbo, and Other Essays. London: Grant Richards, 1897.

_____. Genius Loci: Notes on Places. London, Grant Richards, 1899.

_____. Ariadne in Mantua: A Romance in Five Acts. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1903.

_____. The Enchanted Woods and Other Essays. London: John Lane, 1905.

_____. The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary. London: John Lane, 1906.

_____. The Sentimental Traveller: Notes on Place. London: John Lane, 1908.

_____. Satan the Waster: A Philosophical Trilogy. London: John Lane, 1920.

_____. The Golden Keys, and Other Essays on the Genius Loci. London: John Lane, 1925.

_____. For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories. London: John Lane, 1927.

_____. Music and its Lovers. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932.

_____. Il Settecento in Italia, trans. of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy by Margherita Farina – Cini, Napoli, Riccardo Ricciardi Editore: 1932.

_____. Arianna A Mantova / Ariadne in Mantua, bilingual text, ed. with Introduction by Rita Severi, Fondazione Marcegaglia Edizioni Postumia – Gazoldo degli Ippoliti - Cierre Edizioni – Verona, 1996.

Secondary Sources

Browning, Robert. "Inapprehensiveness" in Asolando, 1888–89. online.

Caballero, Carlo, "A Wicked Voice: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of Music." Victorian Studies. Summer 1992: 385–408.

Cambieri Tosi, Marie José, Carlo Placci. Maestro di cosmopoli nella Firenze fra Otto e Novecento. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1984.

Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003.

Coombs, David Sweeney. Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019 (see Ch. 4, "Tagging the Vaticmn Museum with Vernon Lee: Description and the Aesthetic Movement").

Cooper Willis, Irene. A Vernon Lee Anthology. London: John Lane, 1929.

_____, ed. Vernon Lee's Letters. London: Privately Printed, 1937.

Corrigan, Beatrice. "Giovanni Ruffini's Letters to Vernon Lee, 1875–1879. English Miscellany vol. 13 (1962): 230.

Gagel, Mandy. Selected Letters of Vernon Lee 1856–1935. Boston University, PhD, 2008. Vols. 1 and 2.

Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee Violet Paget 1856–1935. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Mannocchi, Phyllis F. "Vernon Lee: A Reintroduction and Primary Bibliography." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 Vol. 26, 4 (1983): 231-267.

Pantazzi, Sybille. "Carlo Placci and Vernon Lee. Their Letters and Their Friends." English Miscellany Vol. 12 (1961: 97-122.

_____. "Enrico Nencioni, William Wetmore Story and Vernon Lee." English Miscellany Vol. 10 (1959): 256.

Praz, Mario. Il patto col serpente. Milano: Mondadori, 1972. 270–297.

_____. La casa della vita. 2nd ed. Milano: Adelphi, 1986. 275-283.

Reader, Simon. "Unrecovering Vernon Lee." Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonliner Style. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 155-85.

Severi, Rita. "Vernon Lee and Mantua." Journal of Anglo–Italian Studies Vol. 5 (1997): 179–200.

Valentine, Colton. “Vernon Lee, Queer Relations, and a New Guard of Victorianist Multilingualism.” Victorian Studies 64, no. 1 (2021): 62–87.

Web resources: Vernon Lee articles and books at Project Muse, JSTOR, the Internet Archive, and The Sibyl, A Journal of Vernon Lee Studies, ed. by Prof. Sophie Geoffroy.


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Created 4 June 2026

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